StarCrossed. Part 33

For a moment there was shocked silence on that walkway. Even the wind seemed to have lost its voice. Then Meri screamed, a half second too late to be useful, and it knocked me to my senses. I flew to the edge where Daul had jumped - the pentice roof was just below, an easy distance - and Daul was on his feet, disappearing into the white.

I had swung one leg over the wall when Wierolf grabbed me. "Digger, are you crazy? That's a fifteen-foot drop!"

"Let me go - I can catch him!"

"There's nowhere for him to go. Let him run."

I met his pleading gaze with a hard one of my own. "There's been enough running." I slipped over the edge.

And fell hard, with a loud thump, on the slippery pentice roof below. d.a.m.n snow. I slid off onto the ground. My hip was sore, but that was about it. Hiking my skirts in my hand, I sprinted across the courtyard. Daul was halfway to the siege gates, and he had a lot of leg on me.

He also had a pistol, and I only had a dagger, but for the moment I didn't care. All I could think about was catching him, hitting him as hard as I could, hurting him. Making him pay for the threats, the intimidation, the knocks on the head, the scene with Werne that morning. For Meri. For Marlytt.

For the prince.

We ran through the empty courtyard, straight for the gatehouse overlooking the sheer cliff and the army on the ledge below. Opening the siege gates cost Daul some time. I threw myself into his back, slamming his body against the half-open gate. The pistol went skittering toward the ledge.

I was fast, but Daul was stronger. I was mad, but Daul was bigger. We struggled for a moment, but I couldn't match his reach or his power. In no time his hand was crus.h.i.+ng mine, twisting Durrel's knife from my grip. He writhed out from under me, edging back out through the gate, toward the rocky precipice and the steep path down to the waiting army. I scrabbled after him, fighting to find my feet in the snow and my skirts. If I could get the knife back - "What are you doing?" he yelled, but my shoulder hit him squarely in the back, and he stumbled. I knocked his arm aside and grabbed his wrist. He tried to shake me off, and my half-frozen fingers protested - but I'd been building up to this for two months, since the night I'd run from Greenmen instead of standing and fighting with Tegen. I turned under Daul's arm and pulled his hand with me, bracing it against my hip as I leaned into him, trying to get him to drop the dagger. A hand shoved hard against my head, and my feet slipped, dumping me in the snow. But I had the knife.

It was a stupid, scrabbly, awkward, unlovely sort of struggle, each of us unbalanced by the slippery rocks and the wind. We were also getting precariously close to the edge of the mountain - in the whiteness it was impossible to tell where land turned to air. My foot caught in my skirt as I lunged for Daul, knocking him off balance. I slashed at his flailing legs; the knife stuck in his boot leather and threw me sideways with a kick. My head swung through empty air, inches from the dizzying drop.

I hopped back from the ledge a few paces, regrouping, and the knife flew from Daul's boot and whizzed past my left ear. I flinched in time to see him looming up beside me again. I grabbed for his doublet, as his arm snaked upward from his belt, something glinting bright and silver in his hand.

"Digger, watch out!" The prince was pounding through the snow behind us, kicking up plumes of white as he ran. I saw his arm lift just a fraction before Daul did, and I let go of Daul's doublet and dropped back onto the ground.

The prince's knife - that tiny dull carving knife begrudgingly loaned by Lady Lyll - came tumbling through the air and hit Daul, hilt-first, in the shoulder. It fell uselessly to the ground. Daul paused for a moment, glanced down at the knife, and then laughed. He fixed his gaze on the prince.

For a heartbeat, I was frozen with indecision. Somehow my body decided for itself, and my arm stretched out far above my head, searching in the snow, until I found something solid under my numb fingertips. I grabbed it, flung my arm forward as hard as I could, and watched my dagger sail awkwardly through the air and bury itself in Daul's side, just above his belt. Daul stumbled, shook his head as if to clear it, and lost his footing on the narrow ledge.

"Daul - look out!" I'm not sure I really said it, but his eyes widened briefly as the earth fell away behind him. Wierolf dived for me and pulled me to him - but over his shoulder I saw the surprise on Daul's face turn to a thin, wicked smile. He sailed backward over the edge, swallowed up by snow and sky.

"NO!"

I did scream that, into the roaring wind, into Wierolf's shoulder as he held me down. I stared and stared, but all I saw was endless, swirling, deadly white. Wierolf eased off slightly, and I cried out. "I didn't mean to kill him -"

"Of course you didn't. Easy, now."

But hadn't I? "I chased him - you said stop, but I chased him, and if I hadn't, he'd -" My voice was strangled, raw - something I couldn't recognize.

"Listen to me." Wierolf turned my face to his and spoke firmly. "He had a gun. He was going to kill someone. Maybe you, maybe me. You're lucky to be alive. Merista's alive, because of you." He stopped. "G.o.ds - Digger! You're bleeding."

I shook my head. "No, it's Daul's -" and I looked down, to see the prince holding my hand up by the wrist, streaming red against the snow. I'd grabbed Durrel's dagger by the blade, and hadn't felt the edge slicing into my frozen fingers. The prince found his own dull knife a few feet away and tore it through the hem of his s.h.i.+rt. His pale, scarred skin was nearly as white as the world around us.

"Here." He bound my wounded hand, then eased me to my feet, and we both wavered.

"Digger," he said gravely, putting one arm around my shoulders - for comfort or support or both.

"What?"

"I've seen you fight better."

Leaning against him, I laughed until the sobs came.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX.

Wierolf guided me back to the courtyard, leaving the siege gates open to the snow that would, within minutes, bury Daul, my blood, and our scrambled footsteps under a cloak of white. I stumbled, and Wierolf swung me up into his arms like I weighed nothing.

"They'll see you," I protested. "They'll -"

"Let them see me," he said, carrying me onward. "It's about time, don't you think? Here we go, up this step."

"But your wounds -"

We pa.s.sed a knot of men in green, pressed together by guards in silver and black, marching them across the courtyard. I twisted in Wierolf's arms, trying to see. Nemair guards stood at every tower, muskets trained down on the men below.

"What - ? Where did they - ?"

"Do I have to tell you to shut up?"

An hour later I lay propped up in Meri's bed, under a ridiculous heap of blankets and feather beds that didn't really chase the chill away. Lyll and Antoch and Meri were all there, fawning over and coddling me, while the prince - who had refused to leave and apparently realized that no one could, in fact, make him - sprawled awkwardly on the bench by the window.

Lady Lyll tended to my hand properly, tsk-tsking as she did so, but it was still too early to tell how bad the damage was. Chilblains, she'd said, to start - frostbite, which had caused the numbness that kept me from noticing the blade slicing through my flesh. I had cut three fingers deeply, two to the bone, one very close to the fingertip. Lyll warned me I might lose that one, and that my hand might never fully heal. It seemed a small price to pay, she said, for saving her daughter and escaping with my life.

My life. I didn't try to explain how my fingertips were my life.

I couldn't stand them looking at me like that - like I was some kind of hero, when all I could think of was how none of this would have happened, if I'd just kept my fingers to myself. "I - I'm sorry. I didn't mean to lie to you -" I stopped, because of course I'd meant to. I hid my face behind my bandaged hand, but Lady Lyll slowly pulled it back down.

"You saved our daughter's life. That's not something you apologize for."

"What about Werne?" I said. "If he sees Meri, or the prince -"

"No," Wierolf said, crossing over toward me. "That's over now. No more hiding." He sounded strange and determined. "It's time to take a stand. Your lords.h.i.+ps, I understand you have something in the works here at Bryn Shaer? I'd very much like to be a part of that. If you would acquaint me with your allies, I will gladly introduce you to mine."

"Your allies?" Lady Lyll said sharply. "Who?"

Wierolf looked at her evenly. "Tnor Reynart."

Lady Lyll's eyes narrowed, and I couldn't tell what she was thinking. But Meri cried out happily, "Stagne!"

Her mother wheeled her gaze toward Meri, who simply beamed. Lyll scowled and shook her head. "Why do I feel as though I've lost control of things here?"

"Enough," Antoch said. "We've got an injured girl here. No more politics in the sickroom."

But I was desperate to know more. I tried to get out of bed, with the half-formed plan that if we left my sickroom, we could keep talking - but strong arms held me down.

"You really won't rest until you know what's going on, will you?" Wierolf said. I shook my head, so in her low, even voice, Lyll explained every thing I'd missed while scrabbling around in the snow.

Apparently the Inquisitor, unaccustomed to having his prisoners disappear out from under him, had been verging on hysteria, ready to dismiss the Greenmen he'd brought and tear Bryn Shaer apart stone by stone looking for Merista. While the guards were dispatched to retrieve the missing prisoner, Confessors checking the room for magic judged the situation altogether more dangerous than they were presently prepared to contain. They recommended that His Wors.h.i.+p withdraw temporarily, despite the precautions of silver and scripture that were meant to protect the Holy Mother's servants.

"They had my books," Meri said. "To Appear Without Form. To Cloud the Mind. They must have really thought I just disappeared." She sounded a little frightened at the thought. "The things they accused me of . . ."

"And once they discovered that the girl claiming to be Werne's sister had disappeared as well, the Confessors packed up and dragged him out of here," Lyll said. "Apparently two young women with magic running loose is quite a different matter than one girl chained to a chair." Her voice was hard.

"And what about the Greenmen?" I asked.

"Gently encouraged to follow their master," she said. I nodded, remembering the group marched out of the courtyard by the Nemair guards.

"It won't last, though," Antoch said. "They're regrouping, and when they decide that being ejected from Bryn Shaer was an intolerable injury, they'll come at us in force."

"What about Phandre?" I asked.

"She confessed every thing," Lady Lyll said. "If you can call it that. I had no idea she was so angry. I think -" She sighed. "I think she just wanted everyone to see how important she was, to finally prove that she was better than we, somehow."

"Sounds familiar, doesn't it?" Antoch said, and I tried to imagine what it must have been like for her, finding that message about her father's treachery hidden inside those d.a.m.ning books of Meri's. Strangely, the evidence she'd supplied to betray Meri had gone missing as well, though both the Cardom and Cwalo insisted they knew nothing about it.

I closed my eyes. Just like her father, Phandre had betrayed her friends. And for what?

"Where is she now?"

"We had to let her go," Lyll said tiredly. "She made her choice; she packed her things and left with the Inquisitor's men."

Stupid girl. I knew she didn't have any ideals, and now she would be deprived of the comforts she prized so much, as well. It would take the army weeks to get anywhere she could lodge in luxury. And more than that, I think the Nemair had genuinely been fond of her, as fond as anyone could be. I knew they felt responsible for her - and look how she'd paid them back.

"The guards also recovered Lord Daul's body," Wierolf put in gently. "He, uh - landed just outside their camp. There's no question he's dead."

I let out a sigh and felt my ruined hand unclench. "Berdal?"

Antoch answered. "The lad's fine. A little embarra.s.sed, but unharmed. We found him tied up in the attic. Don't judge him too harshly - he took quite a knock on the head."

"But the Inquisition - Werne - the army?" They may have left the castle, but they were still camped, two-hundred-fifty strong, on our doorstep.

The prince darted a glance, full of meaning, toward Lyll, then back to me. "I have a plan for them," he said. "It will require the a.s.sistance of the Lady Merista, when she's feeling up to it."

Meri looked alarmed, but nodded. "Yes, Your Highness," she said.

Lyll cried, "Absolutely not! I forbid it!"

"You can't forbid me, Mother, I'm an adult now," Meri said reasonably, and all of us were shocked to silence.

Finally Antoch broke into a giant laugh that shook the room. "That's my girl." He leaned down and patted me on the head in an affectionate way I kind of loved him for. "Come now, ladies, Highness. Give the girl some room to rest." He ushered Lady Lyll and the prince toward the door, but Meri lingered.

"I'll stay with Celyn," she said. She'd had by far a worse day than mine, but here she was, moving smoothly through the room with a calm confidence that was oddly familiar.

As they filed out, Wierolf bent down to my level, though I saw him wincing, and whispered something in my ear. "If you were my sister, I'd have taken better care of you."

Meri stood beside the bed and poured me a shallow draught of warmed-over wine. Her pale face was whipped with red, her own fingertips spotted white - I'd forgotten she'd been out in the snow for as long as I had - and her wrists were raw from the silver chains.

"Was he really your brother?" she asked.

I took the wine she offered. "Say he's very like me, and I swear by Marau I'll kill you in your sleep."

She smiled a little, holding the goblet to my lips, then stood back and looked at me gravely. "Thank you," she said, almost whispering.

"Sweet little Meri." My voice sounded thick and - silly, and after a second I couldn't remember what I'd said. "Sly little Meri - you drugged me?"

"Poppy," she said, a note of quiet triumph in her voice. "Prince Wierolf said we'd have to trick you into taking it."

For a moment I couldn't fix her in my vision, and then I was too tired to try. I felt something thick and heavy at the end of my hand bounce softly against the bed, and then the warmth of Meri climb ing into bed behind me. Warm arms wrapped around my body, legs tucked behind my own. A soft voice breathed against my ear, "Good night, Celyn."

I slept through that night, and they tried to keep me in bed the next morning too, but the poppy only brought me nightmares of snow and knives and men with blood in their beards. Besides, there was too much going on. I eased myself out of the bed, wincing as I rediscovered every one of my injuries. My hand hurt obscenely - burning and throbbing, and I gave it about ten seconds before I was seeking out a knife to strip the wretched bandages off again.

The door cracked open, and I started guiltily, spinning round to find the prince standing in Meri's doorway.

"Wierolf! I'm half naked!" My voice sounded rusty. I gave a cough.

"Fair's fair," he said cheerfully. "Leave that alone or it will never heal." He strode across the room and threw open the lid to the clothes chest. He pulled out an ivory damask robe of Meri's and helped me slip my bulky arm through the sleeve.

"Have you eaten? Here -" He produced a roll from inside his own jerkin. It was flecked with wooly fluff.

"Whose clothes are those?"

Wierolf paused a moment to display a dun-brown coat and buckskin breeches. "Do you approve? It turns out there's a man-at-arms here who is very nearly of royal stature himself."

"Berdal."

The prince snapped his fingers. "That's the one. A good man."

Prince Wierolf's man. "Yesterday, in the courtyard -"

"Oh, yes. Everyone's talking about how Celyn just-a-maid was plucked from the snow by the gallant prince of Hanival. He's quite the hero, I understand."

"No, I mean -" I sounded impatient. "Why did you come back?"

He lowered himself to the window seat. "Why did you jump off the bailey? We're not runners, Digger, neither of us. The work was here. The danger was here."

"The Inquisitor is here," I added pointedly.

"Ah, yes. Your reunion with your brother sounded very . . . exciting."

I gave a snort. "Meri's kernja-velde was ruined."