The Born Queen - J. Gregory Keyes [118]
The fellow coughed, and blood spewed from his nose.
“Diuvo!” Cazio swore. “He’s alive.”
“So he is,” z’Acatto said.
Snarling, Cazio reached for Acredo.
“No,” z’Acatto said, holding up his hand. “I’ll drag him over in the woods, see if he has anything useful on him. Yes?”
Cazio balanced on his rage for a moment. He looked back at Austra. The blood on her was coming mostly from a series of shallow cuts on her thighs.
“Why don’t you do that,” he said softly.
Cazio dressed quickly and found several skins of white wine liberally mixed with water. As they bumped along in the carriage, their own horses on trotters behind them, he washed Austra’s cuts as best he could. None were particularly deep, but it looked as if the fellow had been cutting a methodical diamond pattern on her. He made another search for any deeper wounds but couldn’t find any.
He was starting on her second leg when she suddenly sucked in a huge breath, then screamed, her eyes wide open and brimming with terror.
“Austra, Austra mia errentera.”
She beat at him with her hands, still screaming, probably unable to hear him over her panic. He let her flail away until she had to pause for breath.
“Austra, it’s Cazio!” he said urgently.
The look in her eyes shifted to dazed puzzlement.
“Cazio?”
“It’s me, errentera, min loof. Porcupine.”
“Cazio!” she gasped. Then she looked down at her bare legs, and a huge sob heaved out of her, and then another. She kept gesturing at her wounds and trying to talk, but she half strangled on whatever she meant to say.
Cazio wrapped his arms around her and pulled her face onto his shoulder.
“It’s not bad,” he whispered in her ear. ‘It’s not bad. Just a few little cuts, that’s all. You’re going to be fine.”
He held her like that for a long time before she could talk.
He got the story out of her in drabs. Her carriage and guard had been set upon by knights, many more of them than Cazio and z’Acatto had dealt with. They had slain her guard to a man.
“There were two leaders,” she said. “The…the man you found in the carriage and a younger fellow with a little beard. They seemed to know who I was, or—I think they thought I was Anne.”
“Why do you say that?” Cazio asked gently.
“I don’t know. Something one of them said. Cazio, it’s hard to remember. But they had some sort of fight, and the younger man said something about the Fratrex Prismo, and that’s—” She shuddered and closed her eyes.
“What?”
“The man you found me with stabbed him in the side of the throat and laughed while he died. The other knights laughed, too. Then he got in the carriage with me, closed the door, and tied my hands behind my back. The way he looked at me. I’ve thought I was going to be raped before, and I’ve seen the look in the eyes of men when they’re thinking about it, but this was more than that.”
“How? What do you mean?”
“More. He wanted more than just to rape me; he wanted something worse. He pulled up my dress, and I didn’t do anything. I thought that if I was quiet, he wouldn’t hurt me. But then he said something about the ‘blood telling,’ and he started to cut me, and then I—” She coughed off into crying again, and he waited, stroking her hair.
“We can talk about it later.”
She shook her head. “If I wait, I won’t be able to. I know I won’t.”
“Go on, then. When you’re ready.”
“I fainted, and when I woke up, he was still cutting me. Blood was all over. I was so scared, Cazio. Everything we’ve been through, everything we’ve seen. I couldn’t take it. I couldn’t take it.”
“What happened?”
“I wanted to hurt him,” she said. “I wanted to reach inside of him and tear him up. I wanted it so bad, and then he screamed, and there was blood, and I don’t remember anything until you were here.”
“It’s over,” he soothed. “The cuts will heal, and everything will be fine.”
“It doesn’t feel that way.”
“I know,” he said, although he reckoned he probably didn’t.
“Now I know how Anne felt,” she said softly. “I should have understood.”
“You mean when she was nearly raped?”
“No.”
Something about