Retribution

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Sometime after midnight, lightning and thunder woke them. Rain pelted them at first, then it turned into a torrent. The blankets were soon soaked, but Hannah still huddled under them because it would be worse to expose herself to the storm without them. She sat miserable, making a tent with her head holding up the blankets, hoping the water would run down the sides in sheets.

Footsteps squished nearby. The corner of her blankets lifted and a hand slipped under the opening and then withdrew. She smelled something odd. What?

Hannah felt a surge of pain. Her eyes opened, but she saw nothing. Her feet were asleep, her wrists hurt, and her mind felt sluggish. She was dry, but not under her blankets.

She felt no breeze, saw no stars and smelled the musty odors of a room long closed up. Her attempt to move her arms failed because ropes bound her wrists and her feet. She lay on her left side, her cheek pressed into the rough stone of a floor. Not a flicker of light revealed where she lay.

Panic surged, and she pulled harder at the ropes, but a slight scuff of a foot on stone drew her attention. She couldn’t see, but she could hear. And smell. She controlled her fear and sniffed the air. Ale, sweat, and wood smoke. A short cough told her a man was near, but not too near.

Oddly, being tied up and laying in the dark in a strange place was not nearly as frightening as being there alone. “Who are you?”

“Shut up and let me sleep.”

The voice was rough, the words slurred as if the speaker had downed a lot of ale. Her eyes searched for light, a sliver from under a door, a single star in a window. There was nothing.

Speaking again would antagonize him, probably a guard who wished to be there only a little less than she did. He was sleeping off the effects of several mugs of ale, and she’d already decided he was not a regular soldier.

Her mind worked slow but provided another clue. The hand that had slipped under her blankets had deposited a sleeping potent, or similar. A spell to knock her out. The storm. It hadn’t been real. Well, real was not the right description, but natural was better. It was unnatural, the sort of storm expected in the lowlands during hot summer evenings, not high in the mountains.

A mage had created the storm. It kept the army huddled against the pouring rain, and the thunder and deluge had covered the footsteps of someone, perhaps many people, entering the camp and capturing her.

They had carried her to the Eagle’s Nest, where she now lay. The words of the crow returned. They know where you are.

It seemed so obvious, now. Travel to the Eagle’s Nest from Calverton took two days. The natural place to stop for the night was beside the river before going into the menacing cleft in the granite wall. There were troops that had traveled the cleft, and more stationed on top of the sides. But there was another way to proceed, a hidden way that allowed Elenore’s people to circle around those advance guards.

The cleft was not a trap, but stopping for the night below it was. As Brice had warned, Elenore had had five years to prepare the trap Hannah had walked into. Like an idiot, Hannah had been as innocent as any bunny hopping down a familiar trail and into a snare.

The guard snored. She had been asleep, and with no light, she was convinced it was still night. But, if that was true, it would soon be daylight because the storm came near midnight.

No, there was a flaw in her calculations. It should take a full day to reach Eagle’s Nest from where she camped and more time for men carrying an unconscious woman. So, she was either in a room without any light at all, or she had been asleep all day, and it was the next night.

She listened for other breathing, hoping she might hear Brice. She heard nothing. A wiggle of her shoulders told her the throwing knife was gone. She bent at the waist and didn’t feel the short blade, but that was expected. She flexed her thigh and found the familiar resistance of the rapier. After finding two knives, they had assumed there were no more.

“How long before morning?”

The snoring stopped, and she heard the guard shift. “Plenty,” he grunted.

Good. That confirmed the idea that she had slept all day. It provided her a timeline. It also told her Elenore was not in the monastery, not yet. But, she would be on her way.

“I have to pee.”

“You just did.”

Hannah felt the wetness now that he mentioned it. After a full day asleep, no wonder. It had probably been what woke her, and in her grogginess, she had been intent on relieving the pain in her bladder. She shut her mouth and tried futilely to relax. The guard began snoring again.

The closing of a door echoing down a distant corridor drew her attention and panic started to return. If the mage came in and found her conscious, he would either torment her or increase the security. Right now, Hannah had a chance to escape by using her oldest magic trick.

Her wrists were tied behind her back. The guard was across the room, but he would quickly notice even a small light behind her if he woke. Hannah’s index finger touched the bindings on her left wrist. The flame from her finger was tiny, but even so, it provided enough light to see the guard.

He sat in a chair with arms, his head slumped forward, his snores regular and even. The footsteps grew louder. She slowly increased the size of the flame, wincing when it burned her wrist. The footsteps continued.

She forced the flame to grow and smelled the hemp burning. The rope parted, and the fire extinguished. Her wrists were free. She reached down inside her waistband and pulled the small rapier from the thin scabbard. She quickly sliced through the ropes around her ankles, took three stumbling steps and sliced the throat of her guard.

The footsteps moved closer, and she leaped to place her back to the wall beside the door. It flew open, coming to a stop when it struck her toe. Light flooded into the room.

She imagined another guard coming to relieve the one she had killed. He carried a lantern and the surprise he would feel as he found the dead guard would be her chance. The holder of the lantern paused for the briefest time, then moved quickly to the guard, placing the lantern on the floor beside him to provide light as he knelt to examine the body. Hannah sidestepped silently from behind the door, knife in hand.

Something warned the man. He spun to face her.

It was not a guard, it was the man she knew as the young mage. He had directed the hunt for her, and he had murdered her father, and the knight, and his servant, all three who had tried to care for her. His face was older, but the same cruel nose, cold eyes, and thin mouth were unmistakable. The lantern displayed an evil and confident expression, like the one she’d first encountered as a child.

“Hannah. I should have known better than to leave you with a single guard.” His voice was soft, his grin more a leer. His eyes fell to her wet pants.

She backed to the wall fighting to bring the trembling in her hands under control. His was the last face she wanted to see.

He said in a tone almost sweet with contempt, “I see you’ve had an accident, but that’s the least of your worries.” His arms raised, all of his fingers aimed at her.

“Don’t do this,” she begged.

“Why not? I’ve waited years for this moment.”

“You killed my father.”

“And his friends. And now his daughter,” he chuckled.

She felt the heat building inside him for the flame he would cast. He drew not only his own heat, but that held within the floor, walls, and even the dead guard. He pulled it and concentrated it, ready to use it as a weapon. The very air dipped in temperature.

Her arms rose reflexively higher in a defense mode, and she drew air inside herself, more and more until she felt the room should be a vacuum. When the first hint of crackling occurred from his fingers, she waited. The weight on his toes increased as he drew back to cast. She still waited.

His eyes and smirk told her when to react. She cast a wall of air as he cast a flame long enough to reach her—but the strength of the wind she created pushed back, and him along with it. The Young Mage struck the wall as if shoved by the hands of a giant, but he remained on his feet, dazed and confused. “What trickery?”

Before he could recover, she cast a ball of fire the size of her fist at his chest. She wanted to aim for his face but feared he might duck. The fire flew from her fingertips directly at his chest and almost reached him before a sphere of water appeared in front of it. The fire sizzled and went out, falling to the floor with a splash.

“Only mages control fire,” he growled, puzzled and sounding scared.

Hannah fought to remember another spell, mage or sorceress based, but a tiny crack of lightning gave away his next move. The Young Mage was going to throw a bolt of lightning inside the room, a dangerous move that might well kill them both. Once lightning is released, it has a mind of its own and might attack him, her, or both.

He wouldn’t dare!

He would.

Not only that, but she’d taken him by surprise with her first defense—but that wouldn’t happen again. Instead of contempt and amusement in his eyes, she saw fear as he realized he faced a woman mage. For him, there could be no greater evil.

However, if he looked into her eyes, he’d see her fear also. Now that he knew she controlled mage powers, no matter how few, or how weak, he would kill her. Elenore might want her alive or wish to witness her death, but the young mage wouldn’t wait. He would kill her as fast as he would a dog with rabies, and regret it as little.

He’d trained as a mage his whole life, and he was older. His powers were probably stronger or more developed. She was going to die.

The training by the combat master took over her conscious thoughts. She wouldn’t give in to panic or quit while she was still breathing. She needed to attack. Her hand settled on the rapier stuffed into her waistband. It was too long and handle-heavy to throw accurately, but the words for the enchantment that would carry it to her target passed her lips as her hair reacted to the pre-lightning by standing on end.

The mage looked a wild man, his shoulder-length hair at attention, his lips pursed, his eyes centered on hers. He transmitted the impression of pure hate. His arms raised, fingers hissing and steaming as he increased the spell to unleash a full bolt of lightning. But, he could only perform one task at a time. All his attention was on the lightning building inside him.

Her arm acted on its own accord, cocking and releasing the knife in almost the same motion. She was looking into his eyes, still expecting to burn in a flash of fury and sound when the rapier struck, point first, above the bridge of his nose, and the slim blade entered to the hilt.

A look of confusion passed his face briefly, then quickly dissolved as his knees buckled and he slid slowly to the floor. Dead.

A sizzle of dissipating energy filled the room. She’d killed the man who had killed so many of her family. Relief or vengeance would have been natural, but all she felt was dull and sluggish. She went to him. She had no weapons, but the knife that killed him wouldn’t touch her hand again. It looked spoiled. Evil.

Hannah thanked the knife, knowing how silly that was, but it had done all it could for her. She stood upright as another door down the long hallway closed. Her mind was still slow from the effects of the spell, she stood in a room where she’d killed two men, and another approached.

She had no weapon, magic took concentration she didn’t have tonight, and worse, she was in a building she had never seen, not even from the outside. Thinking of outside, she realized the chill permeated the room, and probably the building. There were surely more guards—and then Elenore and Jeffery would arrive soon, probably this day.

Carrying the lantern would tell anyone looking where she was, but she couldn’t move in the utter darkness of the stone monastery. She snatched it and stepped to the doorway. Footsteps echoed off stone walls to her right, but they seemed to be getting fainter. Escape or follow?

The young mage had come from the same direction. Chances were, all the guards and people working with Elenore were to her right. It made sense that they would remain close to each other. Brice had described the rest of the building as a maze, and she could lose herself there until rescue arrived. But she still hesitated.

If an entire day had passed since her abduction, Brice and the general might have already arrived. If they had, they might hold off any attack if they believed Hannah was inside and being held hostage.

She would seek a way outside. Mind made up, she turned away from the footsteps, but mentally kept track of where she was in relation to them. A turn to the left, then one to the right, kept them behind her. A doorway beckoned. A horizontal timber held a door large enough to fit a carriage through. Iron straps held it in place. She shoved the wood in the tracks to one side and opened one of the doors enough to look out.

Through the darkness, she saw a moonless sky with stars so bright they nearly produced shadows on the snow. However, snow lay on the ground as deep as her waist, and the cold sucked the air from her lungs and hurt as she inhaled again.

Hannah wore only her wet pants and shirt. Her coat, backpack, and blankets were missing. Fortunately, she had gone to sleep in the pants and shirt, and boots. The hallway had grown colder as she walked, and ahead it was probably as cold as outside. The relief guard would soon find the dead guard and mage, and the hunt would be on. She left the door ajar, thinking it might distract them, giving them a reason to search outside. The snow may have covered her tracks—an unlikely story, but the other reason was it might give access to Brice and the soldiers.

Instead of going deeper into the cold, dark warren of unknown passages, she made her way back to the original room. A single peek inside told her nobody else had been there to discover the bodies. She continued, pausing at each doorway to listen.

As she passed a closed door near the corner, she heard the noise of someone moving around. The hallway continued past two more doors on her right, and then made a turn to the right. She quickly moved to the next closed door and eased it open as she turned the lantern to the lowest setting. The small fire on the wick threatened to go out with each puff of air.

A man slept on a pallet, a mug of ale beside his hand. She slipped inside. His sword and a hefty hunting knife lay beside his uniform. She examined it closer. The material was light green, hardly different than the pants she wore. The shirt and heavy coat may have been the same color a generation ago, but coats were made to fit large and the man sleeping was not that much larger than her. She grabbed a hat with flaps to cover her ears. It would help hide her face. She reached for the knife.

In the hallway again, she turned the lamp slightly higher, and soot on the chimney prevented much of the yellow light from escaping. While wearing the hat she might be confused for a guard, briefly, or if someone just glanced her way. She moved around the corner and down the hallway towards a large open room where several lanterns and candles burned. She blew out her lantern and moved in the shadows.

The smells of food filtered from the room. Not fresh bread or frying meat, but a combination hinting of stew, a staple for armies. Anything growing in gardens or shot by soldiers, or farm animals butchered, were cut into cubes and added to the pot. Her stomach growled in response.

A figure emerged from the dark at the other side of the kitchen and moved in her direction, probably going to enter the hallway where she lurked. Although she moved in the few shadows, he would necessarily go right past her. She increased her speed, and as she left the hallway and entered the kitchen, she turned to her right while listening for a challenge or recognition.

The man kept walking. So did she, never hurrying or drawing attention to herself. As she passed a table with a man spooning stew and slurping loudly, a flicker of movement near the two cooks caught her attention.

One of the cooks disappeared. He dropped from sight as if he’d never been. Hannah knelt and waited. The other cook dropped out of sight and didn’t reappear. The man eating paused, stood, and reached for his sword, his eyes searching for the cooks.

Hannah was slightly behind him. Her hunting knife found its way into her hand and after a glance to be sure they were alone, she silently moved behind him and wrapped her left arm around his neck while pressing the point of the blade into his back as the combat instructor had taught.

She whispered, “Be quiet and you’ll live.”