His hips rocked back and forth, smooth and practised. “Hang on to me,” he said fiercely, and her hands tightened on his shoulders, “and remember that you freely accepted what now I give you.”
“I feel nothing,” she said. “Silvius, what is wrong? I feel nothing.”
“All that matters,” he said, then grunted, thrusting more fiercely than he had heretofore, “is that I feel, my lady, and that your body lies beneath mine.”
Caela closed her eyes, wincing at Silvius’ now violent action, and then, as she felt the sudden wetness of his semen within her, cried out, her eyes flying open.
William sat upright in bed, his body bathed in sweat, his breath heaving in and out.
His eyes still stared wildly, his hands clutched among the bed linens.
He had seen, finally, the man’s face.
His father, Silvius, lay with Cornelia-Caela-whatever else it was that she had become.
And yet, Silvius notwithstanding, in that terrible moment when William had seen his father’s face, and heard him cry out as he shuddered over Caela’s body, William could only see the vision, and how it had ended.
The man’s form changed, blurring slightly. He was grunting now, almost animalistic, and for the first time Brutus saw that Cornelia had her hands on the man’s shoulders as if to push him off.
She cried out, and it was the sound of pain, not passion.
Brutus still could not move, and he watched in horror as the man’s form blurred again, and became something horrible and violent.
A man, yes, with a thick, muscled body, but impossibly with the head of a bull.
The creature tipped back its head and roared, and both Cornelia and Brutus screamed at the same moment.
The creature’s movements became violent, murderous, and Brutus saw that he was using his body as a weapon.
There was blood now, smearing across Cornelia’s belly and flanks, and her head was tipped back, her face screwed up in agony, and her fists beat a useless tattoo across the creature’s back and shoulders.
“Cornelia! Cornelia!” Brutus screamed, and for once both Cornelia and the creature heard him, and both turned their faces to him, and the creature roared once more, and Brutus knew who it was.
Asterion. Cornelia had invited evil incarnate to ride her.
“Caela?” William whispered. He rose from the bed, throwing back the sheets angrily when they tangled briefly in his legs, and walked to stand naked before the window.
“Caela?” he whispered again, staring into the blackness and distance. “What have you done?”
Silvius pulled out from Caela’s body, but did not roll away. Instead he gazed at her, his face hard and watchful.
She lay as if asleep, her face flushed, her breasts rising and falling.
Silvius ran a hand over them, and then down to her belly.
At that her eyes opened.
“Well?” he said, his expression now soft.
She frowned. And then smiled, but it was half-hearted, and troubled. “Thank you,” she said.
“I was not what you wanted,” he said, and then laid a hand over her mouth as she tried to speak. “Never mind,” he continued, his voice a little hard, a little disappointed. “You were all that I wanted.”
Then he rose from her, and was gone.
Oh gods, it was not what I expected. He had constantly told me he was not Brutus, and yet all I could think about when he mounted me was Brutus, and all I wanted was Brutus.
“Do not take me only because I remind you of Brutus,” he’d said.
But I think that was why I had lain with him, the only reason, because his face was that of Brutus, only kinder, and his body was also that of Brutus, only sweeter and gentler.
And yet, when Silvius had mounted me, I could barely restrain from shouting Brutus’ name, from screaming for him. Gods, it was as if he’d been there, watching. All I had wanted was Brutus. All I had thought about was Brutus. All I had felt was Brutus.
So was that why I felt no different—save, of course, for that throbbing heat and the lingering discomfort between my thighs? Is that why that emptiness still echoed within me, why that sense of “un-rightness” had, if anything, grown? Was this my fault, my weakness?
I laid my hand on my belly. My womb felt strangely sore, although I knew there would be no child from this encounter. For that I was heartily glad. I hated to think what mischief my womb might breed from lying with one man while all the while dreaming of another.
I let my head roll to one side. “Brutus,” I whispered. “How is it you can torment me so?”
And then I wept, for the sheer stupidity of that question, and for all the good this night had done me.
Later, when Caela had long gone, Asterion stood in the stone hall, staring at the dark stain of her virgin blood on the stone floor.
He stood there a long while, his face expressionless, then he finally permitted himself a tight smile, and vanished.
FOURTEEN
“I pray you, ladies, do not rise.”
The three women who slept in the chamber outside Swanne’s bedchamber, still blinking sleep from their eyes, glanced at each other in uncertainty.
“I merely go to the Lady Swanne,” the Archbishop of York said, grinning benignly, his fingers laced over his huge stomach. “As her ladyship and I had agreed. As part of our contract. Surely she mentioned this to you?”
The senior among Swanne’s ladies, Hawise, slowly shook her head, her eyes fixed on the archbishop.
Aldred grinned. “What? Swanne modestly unforthcoming? I cannot believe this. And she begged me!”
“I cannot think that my lady—” began Hawise.
“Well, my lady did agree,” Aldred snapped, suddenly waspish. “Do you think that I would have risked Edward’s and, for the sweet Lord’s sake, Harold’s, wrath merely out of the goodness of my heart? No, my lady has a payment to make, and tonight she is going to make good her debts.”
And with that he brushed straight past the one among the women who had risen from her bed, and opened the door into Swanne’s bedchamber.
Swanne had been fast asleep when the sound of a raised male querulous voice had started to pull her from her dreams into wakefulness. Before she could fully rouse, the door to her bedchamber had opened, a vast bulk had moved through the opening, then the door had closed again.
Firmly.
Then came the sound of a bolt sliding home.
Alarmed, Swanne half raised herself, clutching the bed covers to her naked breasts.
“Who…?”
“Your beloved archbishop, my dear. Come to claim his debt.”
“What?” Swanne had been so deeply asleep that she was still not completely awake.
The man—the vast bulk—moved close to her bed, and Swanne instinctively slid away until the bare skin of her back touched the stone wall against which her bed was placed.
Aldred—Swanne recognised him now—started to fumble at the neckline of his robe, where ties held it in place.
Swanne’s mind suddenly snapped into full alertness. Full awareness.
“Begone from here!” she hissed. “Get out!”
“Nonsense, my dear.” The robe now slid from his body and, in the faint light from the partly unshuttered window, Swanne saw the immense expanse of dimpled white flesh that stood before her.
The sight of this sickening mass of a man, the very thought of him clambering atop her, made Swanne feel nauseous, but that initial reaction was instantly overridden by a wave of immense anger.
“Remove yourself!” she shouted.
Aldred took a single pace forward, the numerous rolls of fat over his chest and down to the mound of his belly undulating like the river at high tide, and placed a hand over Swanne’s mouth, forcing her hard back against the wall.
Swanne’s round and furious eyes glared at him over the top of her hand, and she opened her mouth further, meaning to bite him, but just before she could bring her teeth down, something surged throu
gh her…
A sense of terror.
Her breath stopped. The terror had not come from Aldred, nor from the situation in which she found herself. Nor even from herself, for Swanne was furious, not terrified.
It came from memory.
It came from the memory of a woman silently screaming inside Swanne’s skull.
No! No! No!
Then Swanne did feel the first inkling of dread, for she knew who that was.
Ariadne.
No, no, no…
Aldred had clambered on to the bed now, his hand still held brutally tight over Swanne’s mouth, and was kneeling over her, straddling her with his legs.
Something, perhaps the sound of Ariadne’s terror, made Swanne look over his shoulder.
The faint illumination from the window cast Aldred’s shadow on to the far wall.
This shadow was not that of the fat, loathsome man who straddled her.
It was of a fit man, tightly muscled…
…and with the head of a bull.
Up to this moment Swanne had been struggling with the huge man who had forced her back against the wall. Now her efforts became utterly frenzied. She struck at him with her fists, beating without pause, and tried to jerk her knees into him.
She tried to bite him, but his hand had pushed her upper lip hard up against her nose, and she could not force her jaw to close.
He laughed, soft, joyous.
“You know me for who I am now, Swanne?”
She made a strangled sound under his hand, her body trying to buck under his.
“Come now, Swanne. No need for such histrionics. Ariadne didn’t put up a fight like this. You knew, of course, that she and I were lovers as well as siblings?”
Swanne’s eyes were wide with terror, but still her efforts to repel him doubled.
“Enough!” barked Aldred, and the hand and arm which held Swanne became as stone. He shifted his hand slightly so that it covered both Swanne’s nose and her mouth.
She stiffened underneath him, her breasts heaving in their frantic fight for air.
Suddenly, desperate beyond knowing, sure she was about to die, Swanne sent forth a surge of power, trying to push him away with that surge, where her muscles had failed.
“No, my dear,” Aldred whispered. “We can’t have that, can we?” Without any seeming effort he blocked the power, and sent it churning back into Swanne.
She heaved beneath him, unable to bear the twin agonies of lack of oxygen and the painful bite of her power within her own flesh.
A moan gurgled in her throat, and her eyes rolled back into her head. Her struggles lessened, her hands relaxing away from their fists and sliding slowly down the broad expanse of his back.
“Listen to me,” Aldred whispered, leaning over her until his eyes stared into her dying ones. “I will not allow you to slip into either unconsciousness, nor even into death. None of that escape for you. Indeed not. Instead, you can listen to what I have to say, and watch what I have to show you.” He paused. Then, “Can you hear me, Swanne, my dear?”
Swanne’s eyelids slowly dropped in acknowledgment.
Aldred could feel her body twisting beneath his, and he grinned, pleased.
She would exist in this agony of half death until he thought to release her.
Then, of course, she would endure something much more terrible.
“Swanne, beloved…I may call you that, yes?”
She made no response, but Aldred carried on regardless.
“You may be suffering under some disillusionment,” he said. “You may think that the darkcraft is yours, free and clear—even if it hasn’t been of much use to you in this life. You may have believed that Ariadne won it from me completely.”
His voice and body both became rigid with threat. “But there was a condition, my sweet. A condition. And now has come the time for you to pay it out.”
Swanne, who lay suspended between life and death, found her mind filled with images so clear they might have been enacted before her.
…Ariadne clasped to Asterion; the Minotaur’s hand in her waistband.
“I want you to teach me your darkcraft,” she begged. “You are the only one who has ever learned to manipulate the power in the dark heart of the Labyrinth. Now I want you to teach me that darkcraft. I will combine your darkcraft with my powers as Mistress of the Labyrinth, Asterion, to free you completely.”
At this point Ariadne paused, and rested her hands on Asterion’s ruined chest. “I will combine our powers together, beloved brother, to tear apart the Game once and for all. Never again will it ensnare you. That will be my recompense to you for my stupidity in betraying you to Theseus and my payment to you for giving me the power to tear apart Theseus and all he stands for.”
“She was persuasive, wasn’t she?” Aldred whispered. “Who could resist such hair, such eyes, such a mouth…and those breasts! She had just betrayed me to her lover, she had arranged my murder, and here she was, cooing all over me, offering herself to me, and asking me to give myself and my power to her completely. Of course I allowed myself to be tempted! After all, Ariadne was offering me the ultimate aphrodisiac: a life where I’d thought to endure only death.”
He paused, and he grabbed at one of Swanne’s breasts, squeezing it painfully. “Of course, I was not a complete fool for her.”
He held her eyes steady, looking for deception. “You would destroy the Game? Free me so that I may be reborn into life as I will?”
“Yes! This is something that only I can do, you know that…but you must also know I need the use of your darkcraft to do it. Teach it to me, I beg you.”
“If you lie—”
“I do not!”
“If you do not destroy the Game—”
“I will!”
He gazed at her, unsure, unwilling to believe her. “If I give to you the darkcraft,” he said, “and you misuse it in any manner—to trick me or trap me—then I will destroy you.”
She started to speak, but he hushed her. “I will, for there is one thing else that I shall demand of you, Ariadne, Mistress of the Labyrinth.”
“Yes?”
“That in return for teaching you the darkcraft, for opening to you the dark heart of the Labyrinth, you will not only destroy the Game forever, but you will allow me to become your ruler. Your lord. Call it what you want, but know that if you ever attempt to betray me again, if you do not destroy the Game, I demand that you shall fall to the ground before me, and become my creature.”
“Of course!”
His expression did not change. “‘Of course’? With not even a breath to consider? How quickly you agree.”
“I will not betray you again, Asterion. Teach me the darkcraft and I swear—on the life of my daughter!—that I will use it to destroy the Game utterly. It will never entrap you again.”
Aldred’s fingers were still groping at Swanne’s breasts, but the pain of his sharp-nailed fingers could do nothing to eclipse the sickening dread that now coursed through Swanne.
Aldred’s hand on Swanne’s mouth and nose loosened a little, allowing a thin draught of air to trickle between his fingers, and Swanne’s chest bucked in the effort to heave precious oxygen into her lungs.
“And what did you do, Swanne-who-was-once-Genvissa?” Aldred whispered. “What did you do? Why, you started the Game again, thinking that I was too far distant to stop you. I don’t care to hear of your excuses and your reasons, for I know them all. All I do care to hear is your acknowledgment of Ariadne’s oath. She is the one who is going to destroy you, Swanne. Not me.”
His hand removed from her mouth, and Swanne gulped air into her lungs. Aldred sat back, sitting on her lower legs, one fat, dimpled knee to either side of her hips, his hands to his own hips, regarding her with amusement.
“Well?” he said.
“What?” Swanne gasped, and then screamed, her body contorting as Asterion’s power surged through her.
“Do you acknowledge Ariadne’s oath?”
/>
She was still shrieking, and Aldred lifted a hand and struck her hard across the face.
Blood spattered in an arc across the bed.
“Do you acknowledge Ariadne’s oath?”
“Oh gods,” Swanne moaned. “How can I…?”
She screamed again as a counter blow sent her head smashing into the wall.
“It was an oath made on power and on the life of Ariadne’s daughter, my dear. One that bound not only Ariadne, but through that daughter, all Ariadne’s daughter-heirs. What a foremother, hey? What a legacy.” Aldred laughed, the sound rich and deeply amused. “Now, do you acknowledge Ariadne’s oath?”
She tried to deny it. She tried with every fibre of her being, but, desperate as she was, Swanne could not force a denial from her throat. Instead, there came a voice from her mouth that was not only hers, and not just Ariadne’s, but the voice of all her foremothers, Ariadne and her five daughter-heirs before Genvissa.
“Yes,” that voice whispered, a ghastly, echoing utterance that coiled about the room. “Yes, I—” we “—acknowledge the oath.”
Aldred’s body tensed, and Swanne was dimly aware it was because he had drawn in a great breath of triumph. “You know what is going to happen now, Swanne, don’t you?”
Swanne whimpered. It was all she could articulate in her overwhelming sense of horror.
“You are going to fulfil Ariadne’s bargain for her, seeing as she is no longer about to do so herself. And well you should pay, Swanne, since it was you who began the Game again! You who tried to trap me!”
“No, no! I beg you. Anything but—”
“Everything, Swanne. Everything.”
“Please…no…”
Aldred’s hands were now fumbling under the great dewlap of his belly, and before Swanne’s appalled gaze he brought forth his erection.
“No!”
“And now, my lovely, we are going to seal Ariadne’s bargain by the same means she and I originally sanctioned it. Are you ready?”