The Blood Knight - J. Gregory Keyes [20]
She shrieked, and her eyes fluttered open to watery, half-focused reality. She was still in the little room. Someone’s head was pressed against her chest, and she realized with dull outrage that her bodice was open and someone was licking her. She was still in the chair, but his body was between her legs, which she could see were bare of stockings. He had hiked her skirts up all the way to her hips.
“No…” she murmured, pushing at him. “No.”
“Be still,” he hissed. “I told you this wouldn’t be so bad.”
“No!” Anne managed to scream.
“No one can hear you,” he said. “Calm down. I know how to do this.”
“No!”
But he ignored her, not understanding that she wasn’t yelling at him anymore.
She was yelling at her as she rose up from the shadows, her terrible teeth showing in a malicious grin.
LEOFF CLUNG to his Black Marys. No matter how terrible they were, he knew waking would be worse.
And sometimes, in the miasma of darkness and embodied pain, among the distorted faces mouthing threats made all the more terrible by their unintelligibility, amid the worm-dripping corpses and flight across plains that gripped up to his knees like congealed blood, something pleasant shone through, like a clear vein of sunlight in a dark cloud.
This time, as usual, it was music—the cool, sweet chiming of a hammarharp drifting through his agonized dreams like a saint’s breath.
Still he clenched; music had returned to him before, always beginning sweetly but then bending into dread modes that sent him plunging ever deeper into horror, until he put his hands to his ears and begged the holy saints to make it stop.
Yet it stayed sweet this time, if clumsy and amateurish.
Groaning, he pushed at the sticky womb of dream until he tore through to wakefulness.
He thought for a moment he had merely moved to another dream. He lay not on the cold, stinking stone he had become accustomed to but on a soft pallet, his head nested on a pillow. The stench of his own urine was replaced by the faint odor of juniper.
And most of all—most of all, the hammarharp was real, as was the man who sat on its bench, poking awkwardly at the keyboard.
“Prince Robert,” Leoff managed to croak. To his own ear his voice sounded stripped down, as if all the screaming he had done had shredded the cords of his throat.
The man on the stool turned and clapped his hands, apparently delighted, but the hard gems of his eyes reflected the candlelight and nothing more.
“Cavaor Leoff,” he said. “How nice of you to join me. Look, I’ve brought you a present.” He flourished his hands at the hammarharp. “It’s a good one, I’m told,” he went on. “From Virgenya.”
Leoff felt an odd, detached vibration in his limbs. He didn’t see any guards. He was alone with the prince, this man who had condemned him to the mercies of the praifec and his torturers.
He searched his surroundings further. He was in a room a good deal larger than the cell he had occupied when last sleep and delirium had claimed him. Besides the narrow wooden cot on which he lay and the hammarharp, there was another chair, a washbasin and pitcher of water, and—and here he had to rub his eyes—a bookshelf full of tomes and scrifti.
“Come, come,” the prince said. “You must try the instrument. Please, I insist.”
“Your Highness—”
“I insist,” Robert said firmly.
Painfully, Leoff swung his legs down to the floor, feeling one or two of the blisters on his feet burst as he put weight on them. That was such a minor pain, he didn’t even really wince.
The prince—no, he had made himself king now, hadn’t he? The usurper was alone. Queen Muriele was dead; everyone he cared about was dead.
He was worse than dead.
He stepped toward Robert, feeling his knee jar oddly. He would never run again, would he? Never trot across the grass on a spring day, never play with his children—likely never have children, come to that.
He took another step. He was almost close enough now.
“Please,” Robert said wearily, rising from the stool