Ehlana shuddered as she recalled the horror of that endless ride. They had –
Her horse stumbled in the muddy path, and she was jolted forward, bringing her attention back into the immediate present. The cord which tightly bound her wrists to the saddlebow dug into her flesh, and the bleeding started again. She tried to ease into a different position so that the cord would no longer cut into the already open wounds.
‘What are you doing?’ Scarpa demanded. His voice was harsh, and it came out almost as a scream. Scarpa almost always screamed when he was talking to her.
‘I’m just trying to keep the cord from cutting deeper into my wrists, Lord Scarpa,’ she replied meekly. She had been instructed early in her captivity to address him so and she had quickly found that failure to do so resulted in savage mistreatment of Alean and the withholding of food and water.
‘You’re not here to be comfortable, woman!’ he raged at her. ‘You’re here to obey! I see what you’re doing there! If you don’t stop trying to loosen those cords, I’ll use wire!’ His eyes bulged, and she saw again that strange, bluish cast to the whites of those eyes and the abnormally large pupils.
‘Yes, Lord Scarpa,’ she said in her most submissive tone.
He glared at her, his face filled with suspicion and his mad eyes looking hungrily for some excuse to punish or humiliate his prisoners further.
She lowered her gaze to stare fixedly at the rough, muddy track that wound deeper and deeper into the rank, vine-choked forest of the southeast coast of Daresia.
The ship they had boarded at the port of Micae had been a sleek, black-hulled corsair that could not have been built for any honest purpose. She and Alean had been unceremoniously dragged below decks and confined in a cramped compartment that smelled of the bilges and was totally dark. After they had been two hours at sea, the compartment door had opened and Krager had entered with two swarthy sailors, one carrying what appeared to be a decent meal, and the other, two pails of hot water, some soap and a wad of rags for use as towels. Ehlana had resisted an impulse to embrace the fellow.
‘I’m really sorry about all this, Ehlana,’ Krager had apologized, squinting at her nearsightedly, ‘but I have no control of the situation. Be very careful of what you say to Scarpa. You’ve probably noticed that he’s not entirely rational.’ He had looked around nervously, then laid a handful of cheap tallow candles on the rough table and left, chaining the door shut behind him.
They had been five days at sea and had reached Anan, a port city on the edge of the jungles of the southeast coast some time after midnight. Then she and Alean had been hustled into a closed carriage with the pouchy-eyed Baron Parok at the reins. During the transfer from the ship to the carriage, Ehlana had discreetly looked at each of her captors, seeking some weakness. Krager, despite his habitual drunkenness, was too shrewd, and Parok was Scarpa’s long-time confederate, a man evidently untroubled by his friend’s madness. Then she had coolly appraised Elron. She had noticed that under no circumstances would the foppish Astellian poet look her in the eye. His apparent murder of Melidere had evidently filled him with remorse. Elron was a poseur rather than a man of action, and he clearly had no stomach for blood. She had recalled moreover, how vain he had been about his long curls when she had first met him and had wondered what form of duress Scarpa had used to force him to shave his head in order to pose as one of Kring’s Peloi. She had surmised that the violation of his hair had raised certain strong resentments in him. Elron was clearly reluctant to participate in this affair, and that made him the weak link. She kept that fact firmly in mind now. The time might come when she could use it to her advantage.
The carriage had carried them from the waterfront to a large house on the outskirts of Anan. It had been there that Scarpa had spoken with a gaunt Styric with the lumpy features characteristic of the men of his race. The Styric’s name was Keska, and his eyes had the look of one hopelessly damned.
‘I don’t care about the discomfort!’ Scarpa had half-shouted to the gaunt man at one point. ‘Time is important, Keska, time! Just do it! As long as it doesn’t kill us, we can endure it!’
The next morning the significance of that command had become all too obvious. Keska was evidently one of those outcast Styric magicians, but not a very good one. He could, with a great deal of clearly exhausting effort, compress the miles that lay between them and Scarpa’s intended destination, but only a few miles each time, and the compression was accompanied by a horrid kind of wrenching agony. It seemed almost as if the clumsy magician were jerking them up and hurling them blindly forward with every ounce of his strength, and Ehlana could never be certain after each hideous, bruising jump that she was still intact. She felt torn and battered, but did what she could to conceal her pain from Alean. The gentle girl with the large eyes wept almost continuously now, overcome by her pain and fear and the misery of their circumstances.
Ehlana drew her mind into the present and looked about warily. It was approaching evening again. The overcast sky was gradually darkening, and the time of day Ehlana dreaded the most would soon be upon them.
Scarpa looked with some scorn at Keska, who slumped in his saddle like a wilted flower, obviously near exhaustion. ‘This is far enough,’ he said. ‘Set up some kind of camp and get the women down off those horses,’ His brittle eyes grew bright as he looked Ehlana full in the face. ‘It’s time for the bedraggled Queen of the Elenes to beg for her supper again. I do hope she’ll be more convincing this time. It really distresses me to have to refuse her when her pleas aren’t sufficiently sincere.’
‘Ehlana,’ Krager whispered, touching her shoulder. The fire had died down to embers, and Ehlana could hear the sound of snores coming from the other side of their rude camp.
‘What?’ she replied shortly.
‘Keep your voice down.’ He was still wearing the black leather Peloi jerkin, his shaved head was sparsely stubbled, and his wine-reeking breath was nearly overpowering. ‘I’m doing you a favor. Don’t put me in danger. I assume you realize by now that Scarpa’s completely insane?’
‘Really?’ she replied saidonically. ‘What an amazing thing.’
‘Please don’t make this any more difficult. I seem to have made a small error in judgment here. If I’d fully realized how deranged that half-Styric bastard is, I’d have never agreed to take part in this ridiculous adventure.’