Darkspell - Katharine Kerr [172]
“By all the hells! You’re right enough, but are you sure you’d let me? It means my taking over your will.”
“Of course I’d let you. You should know that I’d trust you with my life.”
Nevyn came close to weeping. Hastily he turned away and wiped his eyes on his dirty sleeve while she wondered at it, that her good opinion would mean so much to a man of his powers.
“Well, my thanks,” he said at last. “Let me just get some wood from a servant, and we’ll build a fire.”
By the time the fire was burning steadily, the twilight was deepening to a velvet dark. Nevyn had Jill sit in a chair in front of the fire while he stood behind her. Although she was frightened, with the fear came the same kind of exultation she felt just before a battle. When he laid his hands on the back of her neck, just where the spine meets the skull, at first his fingers seemed normally warm; then the warmth increased and seemed to flow into her very veins, to spread along them through her face and mind, until at last it centered itself between her eyes as a peculiar twisting sensation.
“Look into the fire, child, and think of Sarcyn.”
As soon as she did, she saw him, lying asleep by a campfire, somewhere in hilly country. The image was small at first; then it swelled to fill first the hearth, then her whole mind, until she hovered above the scene the way she did in a true dream. As she floated over the valley, she saw two men leave the trees up the hill and begin to stalk the unsuspecting sleeper. Slowly they moved, and quietly, gliding along low to the ground like ferrets. Even though she’d hated Sarcyn not a minute before, she was suddenly terrified for him.
In her vision-trance she tried to cry out and wake him, but no sound came. She swooped down and grabbed his shoulders, but her incorporeal touch couldn’t shake him awake. Just as the two men pounced, she darted away and stood on the other side of the fire as the Hawks bound and taunted their prisoner. She saw the Hawks stride off, leaving their prisoner alone. All at once she heard Nevyn’s voice in her mind—speaking through her mind.
“Call upon the Light and forswear the Darkness.”
Sarcyn must have heard. He writhed, flopping against his bonds, looking this way and that.
“Call upon the Light and forswear the Darkness.”
Sarcyn looked right at Jill. She could see his eyes narrow as he peered at her; what he could see, she of course could not tell. Since her mind and Nevyn’s were so intertwined, it felt to her that she was weeping real tears over the prisoner as he lay trembling before her, but the grief, she knew, was Nevyn’s.
“Call upon the Light.”
For a long moment Sarcyn stared her way, then wept, his lips moving though she could not decipher what he might have been saying. She glanced round and saw the Hawks, returning with laden horses. Nevyn had apparently seen them, too.
“Come back now!” His voice rang loud in her mind. “They have the power to see you if they should look your way with the second sight. Think of me, child. Come back to the room.”
She pictured him, the room; suddenly her eyes were open, and she was looking into the fire. Nevyn was no longer touching her. She got up, stretching a peculiar stiffness away.
“I never dreamed they’d be following Alastyr along like that,” Nevyn said. “I’ve got to work fast if I’m going to pull our apprentice out of this particular trap.”
“What? Why do you want to save him, after all the foul deeds he’s done?”
“He’ll pay for those crimes, sure enough, but under the laws.”
“But he’s the most hateful swine I’ve ever—”
Nevyn held up his hand flat for silence.
“Why don’t you go down to the great hall and your Rhodry? I’ve got some hard thinking to do.”
As soon as Jill left, Nevyn resumed his restless pacing while he considered what was to be done. He was determined to save Sarcyn from the Hawks more for the good of the kingdom than for that of the apprentice. If he died cursing and screaming under torture, his hatred and