Entreat Me

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  She woke bound to a tree. Something cold and wet spread along her hip, and her back scraped against rough bark. Every muscle in her body screamed; every bone creaked as she straightened from a seated slump and squinted at a dawn world from one blurry eye. She raised her hands to touch her face, only to discover them bound with leather cord. Her feet had been bound as well, bare toes peeping out from under the tattered hem of her night rail. They hadn’t bothered with shoes, but her abductors had kept her from freezing to death by throwing one of her father’s cloaks around her.

  Memories flooded in—the parlor’s wavering lamplight, the enchanted mirror which had become her bane, Jimenin’s lascivious expression as he peered into the glass. And most of all, the distorted image of his fist just before he punched her hard enough to shut one of her eyes and loosen a few of her teeth.

  It was no longer the small hours, and they were no longer in her parlor. Pink morning light had replaced shadows, and she was surrounded by sentinel stands of newly budding birches and oaks. A cluster of horses grazed nearby, and the scent of smoke from a fire teased her nostrils. They were journeying to Ketach Tor.

  She turned her head toward her father’s familiar voice calling her name. For all that the gods and fortune had abandoned her, they had not deserted Mercer. Red-faced with cold, bedraggled and bound like she was, he nonetheless appeared unharmed.

  Her swollen tongue felt glued to the roof of her mouth, and she hissed as her cracked lips split. “Water,” she croaked. Lead weights hung on her lashes, and she closed her eye.

  “Stay awake, Lou,” Mercer urged. “Stay awake. I’ll get you the water.”

  She raised an eyelid, intending to ask him how he planned to do such a thing since he was as tightly trussed to his tree as she was to hers. A pair of fine boots, their high polish dulled by mud, filled her vision. She lifted her head, blinking away dizziness, and met Jimenin’s amused gaze.

  “Nice to have you join us, Mistress Duenda. Sleep well?”

  If her mouth wasn’t robbed of every drop of saliva, she’d spit on him. He held out a cup, pulling back as she reached for it.

  “For gods’ sake, man,” Mercer snapped. “Show some mercy. Wasn’t beating her enough?”

  Jimenin stared at Louvaen, and his mouth curved into a small smile that didn’t touch his eyes. “Not really. Killing her outright might be.” He pushed the cup roughly into her hands. “Good thing for you both I still need her.”

  Her frozen fingers trembled, sloshing water against the cup’s sides. She wanted to guzzle it back but sipped instead, welcoming the cool relief that slid over her swollen tongue and down her parched throat. She tasted the salt of her blood but at least her mouth no longer felt like she’d eaten a plate of sand. Another cup or two would quench her thirst. Unfortunately Jimenin wasn’t in a generous mood. He snatched the cup from her grasp just as she emptied it.

  “Enough pampering. We’re wasting time.” He motioned to one of his men to untie Mercer while he took care of Louvaen. He unfastened the ropes that held her to the tree, reserving one to noose around her neck. He freed her feet but not her hands and used the trailing length of rope from the makeshift collar to jerk her upright. She swayed and swallowed back a groan. Jimenin’s affections and her tumble down the stairs assured she was one giant bruise. “Ride peacefully or you’ll taste more of my fists,” he warned.

  Despite the humiliation of being leashed like a dog, she remained silent and docile, offering no protest when he gave her only the privacy of a juniper shrub to answer nature’s demands. She did cry out when he tossed her roughly onto his horse’s back. His chuckle grated in her ears as he mounted behind her and took up the reins. “This is going to hurt,” he said in tones so thick with anticipation, she fancied he grew hard against her back.

  Her skin did its best to creep off her bones at the thought. He spurred his horse to a gallop, and Louvaen forgot her disgust at his proximity. He was right; it did hurt. Every time a hoof struck ground she imagined one of her ribs cracked loose. Each inhale was a stream of cold air and glass splinters that settled in her chest.

  They rode until the sun grazed the treetops and the distant lament of wolf song serenaded them through the trees. Louvaen estimated if they continued at their current pace, they’d reach Ketach Tor by midafternoon the following day—if Ambrose’s journey spell still worked. If not, she’d spend almost a week in Jimenin’s foul company. Part of her hoped the spell had faded. Surely by then those at the castle would know they had enemies headed for their door and take precautions—namely spiriting Cinnia away from danger.

  A dreary clearing much like the one in which she woke earlier in the morning became their temporary camp. Louvaen accepted another cup of water but refused the hard bread one of Jimenin’s men thrust at her. Her stomach roiled at the thought of food and her jaw ached at the idea of chewing anything tougher than gruel.

  “You need to eat something, daughter.” Mercer sat nearby, too far for her to cause trouble but close enough that he could speak to her without shouting.

  “I’m not hungry, Papa. Besides, I wouldn’t trust anything Jimenin or his ilk gave me. I’m surprised I’m not yet dead from drinking the water.”

  “How do you feel?”

  Like she’d ridden this far tied to Jimenin’s horse’s hooves instead of mounted on its back. Her father’s pinched expression stopped her from counting off a litany of complaints. She shrugged. “I won’t be dancing any reels these next few days.”

  “I told you, you shouldn’t have returned to Monteblanco.”

  She sighed. “I know, but we’re here, and we need to make sure we stay alive long enough so I can cut that toad’s heart out with my eating knife.”

  As if he heard her threat, the toad sauntered across camp, her mirror in hand, to where she sat tethered to a stake one of the men had driven into the ground. He tossed something at her. It struck her shoulder, bounced off and rolled drunkenly toward her foot—an apple, crimson and glistening. Louvaen’s sore mouth watered at the sight, even as her teeth throbbed in warning. She turned a blank stare on her captor. “What do you want?”

  Jimenin gestured to the apple. “They’re not bad you know. Straight from your neighbor’s root cellar.”

  “Pilfered no doubt.”

  He shrugged. “She won’t miss them.” He held the mirror up to her, making her squint from the sun’s glare on the glass. “I’ve a need to see her. Summon her.”

  Her frightful reflection stared back—black eye, swollen face, split lip. Her fingers itched to snatch mirror out of his hand and crack the glass into a thousand shards. Jimenin was careful though and kept it well out of her reach. “Why? You’ll see her in person soon enough.”

  His scowl warned she tried his patience. “The fairest woman of all. What man not blind wouldn’t want to look his fill?” The scowl deepened. “And because I said so. Now summon her.”

  Louvaen’s frown mimicked his, but she did as he commanded. The mist arose, followed by a wavering vision of a stone wall that faded just as quickly back to the wispy miasma. Her heart stuttered to a halt for a tiny breath of time.

  Jimenin shook the mirror before thrusting it in her face. “What’s wrong? Do it again.”

  She called Cinnia’s name a second time, this time with gusto. The same thing happened—mist and a wall and mist again, but no Cinnia. If she didn’t think she’d die for the effort, she’d leap to her feet and whoop her joy. Someone in Ketach Tor had learned her fate, and Ambrose had done as she’d hoped. She offered her nemesis a bland expression when he turned on her. He leapt forward, thrust his hand in her hair and yanked until he pulled her head back, exposing her throat. Louvaen yelped, and tears blurred her sight. The thin edge of cold metal pressed against her flesh.

  Jimenin’s breath cascaded over her face in rancid puffs, and his eyes glittered. “What did you do to the mirror, witch?”

  She tried not to gag around her words. “Nothing.”
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  He pressed the blade harder against her throat. “Liar! Fix the mirror.”

  “I can’t fix what I didn’t break, you slapskull.” Louvaen grabbed his wrist and glared into Jimenin’s flat eyes. “Either cut or leave me alone!”

  He threw her from him. She sprawled in a heap and rolled away in case he decided to land another kick. Jimenin bellowed his frustration and stalked back to where his men gathered around the fire, watching him with wary eyes.

  Her first victory since he’d broken into her house and abducted her and Mercer. Louvaen hid her face behind her tangled hair, not wanting him to catch her smile. She turned to her father and gave him a quick nod of assurance that she was fine despite this latest harrowing clash with Jimenin.

  He came to her twice more; she summoned both times and failed to raise Cinnia’s image in either attempt. The mirror was still a beacon and therefore still a problem, but at least it no longer offered Cinnia to his lecherous gaze. He gave up after that, but his inability to watch his prey in the mirror spurred him to a more grueling pace. They rode through the night. Louvaen’s fatigue overrode her revulsion, and she fell asleep against Jimenin’s chest. He woke her by shoving her off his horse with a brusque command she had to the count of ten to piss before he dragged her back. Dazed and breathless from her spill out of the saddle, she limped to the nearest bush, managing to return before Jimenin called out “Eight.”

  They made it to the tract of woodland containing Ambrose’s journey spell in late afternoon. A belt of watery air splashed with ribbons of blue luminescence stretched from left to right, far beyond the visible horizons. Louvaen had crossed it on her trips to and from Ketach Tor. Both Plowfoot and Sparrow had panicked at the twisting, warping feel of being cast leagues from one place to another faster than the snap of fingers. Unaware of the spell’s presence, the men advanced toward the ensorcelled wall. Only the horses sensed a strangeness. They whickered to each other and pranced restlessly beneath their riders.

  Louvaen wrestled with the idea of warning Jimenin about the journey spell. If she did, he’d demand to know why she hadn’t told him before now, then interrogate her about her ability. She didn’t like him learning that her mother’s gift for sorcery allowed her to see magic when others couldn’t. She stayed quiet and gripped the saddle’s pommel in preparation for the transition from lowland forest to mountain woodland.

  Her stomach hurtled into her throat before plummeting to her knees as they rode through the bespelled wall and into a blizzard’s white howl. She held her seat even as Jimenin fought to bring his panicked mount under control. Their ordered party disintegrated into a chaotic throng of yelling men and bucking horses. It took several minutes of Jimenin’s shouting and a few mad dashes into the trees before they found order. Louvaen peered into the snow-shrouded crowd, relieved to see her father had suffered nothing more than a scare. He sat pillion behind one of Jimenin’s minions, staring at her wide-eyed.

  In the gray gloaming Jimenin’s face had taken on a feral look—lips peeled back from discolored teeth, pupils dilated so they darkened his eyes to a hollow black. He shook her. “What sorcery is this? Where are we?” The keening wind thinned his voice to a petulant whine.

  Louvaen wiped snowflakes from her lashes and peered across the gorge to the structure perched on its spit of rock. She forgot the cold, the pain, the fear for her father and sister. Magic swamped her senses, and she gave a small sob. The flux had risen—not in slow tide but in a giant wave, battering everything around it. Blue sparks shot through the air, joined by undulating rivers of the same light that washed the castle and surrounding land. The drawbridge was lowered and the portcullis raised. Either Ketach Tor stood deserted, or they were expected. She wanted nothing more than to leap off Jimenin’s horse and race across the bridge. Somewhere in that battered fortress an equally battered man waited—completely mad, utterly inhuman.

  At her silence, Jimenin pulled her hair. She hissed and pointed to the castle. “Ketach Tor,” she shouted above the wind. “You’ve reached Ketach Tor.”

  He leaned into her, his mouth damp against her ear. “If this is a trick, I’ll butcher your father right here and toss the pieces into the ravine. Then I’ll turn my men on you. There are more than few here not so choosy as I. Any warm cunt will do. You’ll bleed to death in the snow—if you don’t freeze first.”

  The shudder rising up from her toes to encompass every part of her body nearly toppled her from the horse. She congratulated herself for somehow keeping her voice steady. “The mirror’s beacon worked,” she said. That is the home of Gavin de Lovet.”

  What he lacked in honor and morality, Jimenin possessed in leadership ability. In short order he’d gathered his men and ordered them across the drawbridge. They advanced slowly—Jimenin at the lead—and clopped over the bridge’s creaking wood. Huddled within her father’s thin cloak, Louvaen shivered and squinted into the snow flurries whirling around them. The weather hadn’t been so bad or so bitter when she left for Monteblanco, and she wondered if Ambrose had used his sorcery to strengthen winter’s last grip on Ketach Tor.

  They crossed over the bridge, through the barbican, and into the deserted bailey without incident. While the wind had quieted from a wail to a moan, the snow fell heavy. The castle loomed above them, a wall of stone wrapped in twilight. A murmur rose to her right, sibilant and rustling. All the hairs on her nape stiffened. She knew that hated sound, and if the horses didn’t know it, they still recognized the threat of a predator. Jimenin’s mount shied sideways, and his ears flattened against his head. The other horses followed suit. Louvaen peered into the shadows and shrank away.

  Isabeau’s malevolent roses had swallowed up half the bailey and nearly all the tower keep. Silhouettes of thorny vines snaked up the stones, spilling into the window of Ballard’s bedchamber. Those on the grounds swayed from side to side, their dark blooms like snapping jaws. Jimenin’s men made signs with their fingers to ward off evil and wondered aloud what black sorcery abounded in Ketach Tor.

  “Hold your tongues and light some torches, you bunch of lobcocks,” Jimenin ordered. “I’ll not be chased off by some talking flower.” The strike of flint and the hiss of sparks on resinous pinewood heralded coronas of light that revealed the bailey’s dilapidated buildings and squirming roses. After a pause, Jimenin spoke. “Cinnia married for this?” he said in a sneering voice.

  Louvaen was tempted to taunt him, to tell him the woman he so badly craved married de Lovet despite his apparent poverty because she loved him and would live in rags or alone before she’d surrender to Jimenin.

  “Oh Cinnia,” he called out in a sing-song voice. “Come out, come out wherever you are.”

  Louvaen held her breath as the flicker of candlelight suddenly appeared in a parchment covered window and the main doors creaked slowly open.

  A slight figure holding the candle appeared in the doorway. Louvaen couldn’t help it. She cried out at the sight of her sister, cloaked and hooded. “Cinnia, stay inside!”

  Jimenin shoved the barrel of one of his pistols into her uninjured side. “Shut up,” he said. He addressed the approaching figure once more. “Come and greet us, fair maiden. Your father and sister are eager to see you.”

  Cinnia picked her way daintily across the bailey. Louvaen squinted and leaned forward for a better look. An aura of cerulean light surrounded Cinnia. The candle flame danced in the frigid wind, and for just a moment Ambrose’s face stared back at her from the hood’s shadows.

  Louvaen jerked in surprise, deaf to Jimenin’s snarl that she keep still. She felt the change in her captor’s breathing—quick, eager breaths and the speedy rhythm of his black heart—as the sorcerer drew close. The false Cinnia raised her candle, revealing the lovely face which had brought them all to this point and place. The brown eyes were solemn, the full-lipped mouth unsmiling but still seductive. “Here I am, Don Jimenin,” she said in sugared tones that were all Cinnia and nothing of Ambrose. “What would you have of me?”


  Not yet sure of his triumph nor fully ensnared by his prey’s beauty and proximity, Jimenin kept a firm grip on Louvaen and distance from Cinnia. “Where’s your husband, girl?”

  Her eyes filled with tears. “He is dead, sir.”

  This Cinnia might be an illusion, but the grief was real. Louvaen choked back a sob. Gavin was dead. And if he was dead, then so was Ballard. Something inside her cracked—the scab of an old wound made when she lost Thomas. Ballard’s death reopened it, and the wound hurt a thousand times worse. She’d been with Thomas when he died; she’d been tied to a tree or strapped to Jimenin’s horse when Ballard had succumbed, destroyed at last by his own hand or by his son. The roses had told the tale with their conquering of the tower keep, but she’d held onto a slim hope that the two men might be saved despite the flux flooding Ketach Tor. They had failed to break Isabeau’s curse. She stared at Ambrose disguised as Cinnia, at the bleak despair in his ensorcelled eyes. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “So very sorry.”

  Another realization squeezed the last bit of air out of her lungs. With Gavin dead, what had happened to the real Cinnia?

  Ambrose blinked long, tear-soaked lashes and gave a wordless nod. He turned his attention back to Jimenin. Louvaen couldn’t see the man’s face, but the satisfaction in his voice was clear enough. “That makes things much easier for everyone.” He lowered the pistol from Louvaen’s side. “You’ll switch places with your sister and leave with me. No struggle, no protest and I’ll let your father live.”

  “What about Louvaen?”

  “We’ll see.”

  Ambrose glanced at her, his gaze granite-hard and bright with a silent message: Be ready. Their short relationship had always been one of sparring insults and wary truces, but she’d come to respect the wily sorcerer and gave him the trust he’d so valiantly earned when he walked amongst the enemy to save her. She inclined her head.

  He bestowed a limpid look on Jimenin. “I will come with you,” he said simply.