He'd forgotten he held it, she was sure, and he was only intending to hit her, but instead he was going to kill her and her arms were tied behind her and there was nothing she could do to protect herself. She shrank away as far as she could, which wasn't far enough, from the knife, from the crazed look in his eyes.
Atherton didn't strike. He only repeated, "Then you'll know what it's like."
She didn't say that she already knew what it was like. "I'll tell them nothing," she said. "If you're going to kill us anyway, why should I cooperate?"
"For a fast death by fire," he told her, "rather than by knives, inch by inch for days and days. And days." He was breathing as unsteadily as Selendrile. "For this favor, you will tell them everything, and you will buy back my soul."
For a moment she thought he meant that her admission of guilt would buy back his honor, his reputation.
But then in one giddy realization she knew what he really meant.
And how he'd escaped the angry mob in Griswold.
And where he'd learned what Selendrile really was, and how iron would bind him.
"The witch in the glen," she whispered. "You sold your soul to her to get revenge on me."
"And when we get back there, you'll tell her that you'll take my place." Atherton flung her away from him so that, without her arms to balance herself, she fell down on one knee on the road. "Move," he snarled, indicating the direction toward Griswold.
WITH ATHERTON WALKING behind them, Alys didn't even try to squirm loose of the rope. What good would it do when, in the moonlight, he could see every move?
Beside her, Selendrile was shivering, and several times Atherton prodded him to get him moving faster. Once he stumbled and fell, and Atherton dragged him back to his feet by the hair. The second time, Atherton began screaming at him and strode forward so purposefully, with his dagger ready, that Alys threw herself to her knees behind him to protect his back. "Get up," she begged.
Selendrile leaned against her, and she thought he was too weak to go any farther. But possibly he drew strength from her, for he managed to stagger to his feet before Atherton could separate them.
The Inquisitor pulled her up by her shirt.
"Harm him and I'll never admit to anything," she warned.
Atherton just smiled at her, as coldly as Selendrile had ever done.
She thought he meant to walk all the way to Griswold that very night, but he stopped when they reached the hilltop where Alys had been condemned to die.
"We'll rest here," Atherton smirked, standing before the pole to which she'd been tied. "For old times' sake." He tucked his dagger into its sheath on his belt. Then, before she knew what was happening, he hooked his leg around hers and sent her sprawling.
From the ground, she saw him yank up on the chain that connected Selendrile's shackles, twisting the iron into his flesh. Selendrile gasped in pain and his knees buckled. Atherton yanked again, forcing him to fall into a sitting position, his back almost against the pole.
And suddenly, as Atherton reached into the leather pouch on his belt, Alys knew what he was doing.
He was counting on the dragon-youth being too overwhelmed with pain to resist being se cured to the pole, but he'd made a mistake knocking her down where she stood rather than commanding her to move away and to keep her back to them. As soon as he unlocked the left shackle, Alys leaped to her feet and ran at him, head lowered like a goat.
With his own head bent down, concentrating on watching Selendrile, Atherton didn't see her till the last moment. He had time to turn to take the blow on his upper arm rather than his chest, but all three of them went sprawling in a tangle of arms and legs.
Having the use of both arms, Atherton recovered first and pulled himself to his knees. But rather than lashing out at either of them or going for his dagger, he did the worst possible thing: He hurled the key into the surrounding forest.
In another moment Selendrile whipped the loose chain around the Inquisitor's neck. The iron must have cut deeply into his own wrist and hands, but he tightened the chain and kept it up and kept it up until Alys, lying on her stomach with her face lifted up from the grass, realized that he wasn't going to let go. Certainly she had seen people die before, even her own father not four days since. But she'd never seen someone being killed before. "Selendrile," she said as Atherton's fingers scrabbled, weaker and weaker now, at the chain. "Selendrile!"
He looked up at her. His purple eyes met hers. Held hers. And still he didn't release the chain.
What had she done? As foul as Atherton was, she couldn't just stand by and watch him die. "Stop it," she told Selendrile. She scrambled to her feet, but by then Atherton's eyes rolled upward and he went limp against Selendrile.
Slumped over like that, he looked too much like her own father in Gower's storeroom.
"Stop!"
Still Selendrile didn't let go and didn't let go, and when he did, finally, it was only after giving the chain a final vicious tug, and—even if the Inquisitor hadn't been dead before—Alys heard his neck snap.
Now, slowly, Selendrile stood, too. The eyes that had looked so cool, so emotionless during the killing, now smoldered. "Stop?" he said. "Now? Isn't this what you wanted? Isn't this what you asked me to do?" He grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her.
"Yes," she said softly, and wondered: What have I done? Fly over the village, she'd told him, breathing fire and roasting them all, down to the last baby. She swallowed. "It's exactly what I asked you to do."
He seemed to suddenly feel the drag of the chain on his wrist and he let her go. Moving slowly, he got the dagger from Atherton's belt, holding it carefully by the wooden handle. Just how angry was he? Alys asked herself, warily watching his approach, afraid of him once more. She had talked herself into believing that—deep down—he was like her, thought like her, felt like her. She held her breath. But he only turned her around and cut through the rope that held her. Then, letting the dagger drop, he staggered several steps away before sitting down heavily on the ground. Too hurt to move? But he was running his left hand through the grass.
A moment later she realized he was searching for the key. Iron to bind the fey, Atherton had said. His death hadn't changed that. "You're not looking far enough." She carefully avoided looking at the body. "He threw it into the trees."
He glanced up at her but said nothing.
Alys went to the line of trees, where the branches blocked the moonlight, and she had to get down on her hands and knees to feel the ground. She found little stones, and leaves and twigs from autumns gone by, but no key.
Perhaps it had landed farther away than she'd thought. She crawled farther, and farther, past the point where it could conceivably have reached, to the left and right of where she'd seen it fly, and still no sign of it.
She looked up through the trees back into the clearing. Annoyed, she saw that Selendrile was sitting exactly where she had left him, which just went to show that the key couldn't be that important to him. "Well," she said, wiping her gritty hands on her breeches, "we'll wait until morning, see if it's any easier to find in the daylight. If not, we'll have to think of some story to tell the blacksmith in Griswold, and have him cut the shackles off."
By this time, she'd made it back to him, and he looked up at her with that same calm expression he'd had while killing Atherton. "By morning I'll be dead."
She would have accused him of exaggerating, except that his level tone was like ice down her back. Iron to bind the fey. She had seen that it was poisoning him and she had refused to acknowledge it. She knelt down in front of him. His wrists were bruised and raw, though she could see from his still-bound right wrist that the iron band was loose enough that it could twist around freely. Not loose enough to slip over his hand though. The mechanism could tighten by pushing, but needed a key to loosen. "Maybe if we ripped your shirt—or Atherton's—and wrapped the fabric around the iron to protect the skin—we'll start out for Griswold immediately—or Saint Toby's, that's closer, a
lthough I don't know what we'll tell them—or—"
"Alys," he said, and it was the first time he'd ever called her by her real name. It made her stop, wait, while he closed his eyes and took a deep breath. "I can't change back into a dragon while I'm bound by the iron."
"Yes," she said.
"And I have to be a dragon come dawn or I'll die."
"Why?"
"Why?" He sighed, sounding more tired than exasperated. "Why can't you soar on the wind? Why can't you breathe underwater? Why can't you she'd your skin and turn into a butterfly?"
She didn't understand. But she believed.
"All right," she said. He couldn't die now. Not after all this. "The night's not even half gone. We'll walk back to Saint Toby's..." She drifted off because he was shaking his head, and in fact she could see it as well as he: He'd scarcely made it here; there was no way he could walk all the way back to Saint Toby's. "All right," she said again. "I'll go. I'll run back to Saint Toby's. I'll get one of my father's metal-cutting tools and run back here with it. I'll—"
"There's not enough time," Selendrile interrupted her.
He might have been right. Or not. She couldn't be sure. "Well, what should we do?" she demanded.
Selendrile shook his head. "I don't know." His voice was soft, hopeless. "I've run out of plans."
"I'll go to Saint Toby's, then. You can keep looking for the key." He started to protest and she talked over his objections. "You might find it. Maybe. It's better than doing nothing."
There was just a flicker of fear in the set of his mouth, and then he lowered his eyes, accepting her judgment. And that was when she knew that he didn't believe that she'd be back, or at least not in time; but he was too proud to ask her not to let him die alone.
"I'm not going to abandon you," she promised him. "I'll be back, and I'll be back in time." She threw her arms around him and gave him a quick kiss, too quick for him to be able to respond, even if dragons knew how. But he caught her hand in his, which was, she knew, as close as he'd come to asking her to stay. She wanted to linger, to reassure him, but knew she might need the time that it would take. She pulled away. "I'm sure I can be back," she told him.
But she wasn't sure.
Chapter 14
ALYS RAN WHERE the path permitted, and fretted when tree roots or knife-pricks of exhaustion forced her to slow. Feebleminded, that's what she was. Selendrile had admitted from the first that he was a liar, and if she'd stopped to think about it she'd have known that the greater part of lying was not telling everything. How could she have assumed that he'd freely share his limitations? She'd had to guess that he couldn't speak except when he was in human form; how then could it have escaped her notice that he was always somewhere else during daylight hours?
It wasn't fair if he died because she hadn't been paying attention.
Especially now, having Atherton's death on his soul.
If he had a soul.
"He didn't mean it," she said out loud, meaning the words for God. "He doesn't think the way people do, and anyway he did it for me."
Speaking took the last of her breath and she had to stop, hands braced against her knees, panting. She thought, for the first time, about what it meant to be without a soul. Not petty and cruel, which Atherton had always been, but actually lacking a soul. Certainly Atherton's dead body didn't look significantly different from her father's. Would it? Could a soul be bougnt or traded, like woven baskets or salted fish? The more Alys thought about it, the less she believed so. And yet ... and yet, she thought, she herself had come dangerously close—not to selling her soul, but to giving it away, to throwing it away—in her search for revenge. And she hadn't needed the help of the witch in the glen to do it.
"He's sorry," Alys gasped to God. "I know he is. I'm sorry. Please don't let him die."
Surely the fact that Atherton had been plan- ning to let Selendrile die should count for something.
As soon as she caught her breath, she once again began running.
When she—finally—approached the last curve before Saint Toby's, she tried to gauge how long she'd been and how much time was left. But she couldn't be sure. There was no sign of the sky becoming lighter in the east, which would have meant there definitely wasn't time to get back. But this way it was an agonizing case of maybe she could, and maybe she couldn't.
The village was still, no candles burning, the houses black blocks beneath the moon. She slowed to a walk, which was quieter than running, and approached the door to the tin shop. Saint Toby's was too small for locks, but there was a latch on the door to keep it from blowing open. Alys lifted the wooden beam out of the slot and gently lowered it.
The door creaked as she pushed, and she paused, thinking her heart would stop from the fear of getting caught. She fought her instinct to bolt, to hide in the surrounding darkness of the trees. Surely the noise seemed louder to her than it really was. From all around her in the village she heard nothing out of the ordinary, nothing to suggest anyone had heard or was watching. She stepped into the shop and slowly, slowly leaned against the door, pushing it shut as the hinges again screeched.
She blinked, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the darkness.
They didn't.
There was a window on the far wall, she knew even though she couldn't see it. Even the little bit of light she'd get from opening the shutters would be enough for her to find her way around this shop, which had always been a part of her life. But it was different, it didn't feel the same knowing that her father would never be back. She'd find a tool with which to cut Selendrile's one remaining shackle and be out of here in the time it would take to say two Pater Nosters.
Carefully she slid her feet across the packed-dirt floor so that she wouldn't trip over anything that wasn't where she remembered. On the third slide, her foot struck something—a table leg?—which had no business being there. Instinctively she straightened her arms in front of her. But it wasn't a table leg; it was
Alys sat on the floor where she'd landed, holding her breath, waiting for someone to come in and kill her.
Nothing, nobody stirred.
A wheel. It was a wheel she'd tumbled over. Gower hadn't wasted a moment taking over her father's shop.
Once she stopped shaking, she got to her hands and knees very slowly and crawled to the door. She opened it a crack and peeked out into the street. Much good stealth would do now that the door had once again shrieked on its hinges, announcing her intent.
As far as she could see, nobody was coming.
Alys took a deep breath and stood.
The open door illuminated the shop somewhat. And anyway, she couldn't very well flee, knowing that that would condemn Selendrile to death. Unless, of course, he'd somehow found the key—which she didn't believe for a moment. She picked her way across the rubble she'd made on the floor and headed toward the cabinet where her father had kept the smaller of his tools. As she'd expected, they were gone, replaced by the wheelwright's equipment. Why hadn't she noticed the smell of fresh-cut wood and shavings before? Still, there had to be something here she could use. Chisels, awls, a mallet.
She had just put her hand out to sort through the tools when someone seized her elbow and spun her around, flinging her hard against the wall.
"I thought I'd—" Gower's eyes narrowed in recognition. "You," he said with such feeling that Alys knew he saw beyond the boy's clothing and filthy face of the "injured boy" who'd been his houseguest. "Ahh," he continued, "now I understand what's been going on."
This
was no time to be meek. "Do you think people will believe you?" Alys demanded. "Wheels that fall apart, wife ready to run off with the first handsome young stranger, daughter dabbling in magic—have they started to talk yet?"
By the way he shook her, she knew they had. "You'll come with me, girl, and everyone'll know you're behind it all soon's they see you. All they got to do is catch one look at you in them boy's clothes. Soon's they start wondering how you got away from that dragon, they won't care about any wheels." He started to pull her toward the door.
Alys dug her heels into the floor. "Selendrile rescued me from the dragon." That much was certainly true. "And as for coming back here, that proves my innocence. If I was really a witch, I'd have cast a spell and been done with all of you. There'd have been no reason to come back. Etta's the witch."
Gower paused while he tried to reason it out. Then, "No," he said, tugging again, "they'll know it was you."
"I'll deny it. And there'll always be that doubt. Any time anything goes wrong, they'll wonder." She caught hold of the doorway before he could drag her outside. "But it doesn't have to be that way."
He tugged and it felt as though her fingers were going to fall off.
"Gower, it doesn't have to be that way."
He finally hesitated. "What are you saying?"
"I'll admit to everything. I'll clear your name, restore your family's reputation."
"In exchange for what?"
"For you letting me go."
"What?" Once again he started yanking at her, even while she said, "I'll come back, on my honor I will."
"The honor of a witch?" he scoffed. "A witch who's given herself to the devil—"