She tried not to gag around her words. “Nothing.”
He pressed the blade harder against her throat. “Liar! Fix the mirror.”
“I can’t fix what I didn’t break, you slapskull.” Louvaen grabbed his wrist and glared into Jimenin’s flat eyes. “Either cut or leave me alone!”
He threw her from him. She sprawled in a heap and rolled away in case he decided to land another kick. Jimenin bellowed his frustration and stalked back to where his men gathered around the fire, watching him with wary eyes.
Her first victory since he’d broken into her house and abducted her and Mercer. Louvaen hid her face behind her tangled hair, not wanting him to catch her smile. She turned to her father and gave him a quick nod of assurance that she was fine despite this latest harrowing clash with Jimenin.
He came to her twice more; she summoned both times and failed to raise Cinnia’s image in either attempt. The mirror was still a beacon and therefore still a problem, but at least it no longer offered Cinnia to his lecherous gaze. He gave up after that, but his inability to watch his prey in the mirror spurred him to a more grueling pace. They rode through the night. Louvaen’s fatigue overrode her revulsion, and she fell asleep against Jimenin’s chest. He woke her by shoving her off his horse with a brusque command she had to the count of ten to piss before he dragged her back. Dazed and breathless from her spill out of the saddle, she limped to the nearest bush, managing to return before Jimenin called out “Eight.”
They made it to the tract of woodland containing Ambrose’s journey spell in late afternoon. A belt of watery air splashed with ribbons of blue luminescence stretched from left to right, far beyond the visible horizons. Louvaen had crossed it on her trips to and from Ketach Tor. Both Plowfoot and Sparrow had panicked at the twisting, warping feel of being cast leagues from one place to another faster than the snap of fingers. Unaware of the spell’s presence, the men advanced toward the ensorcelled wall. Only the horses sensed a strangeness. They whickered to each other and pranced restlessly beneath their riders.
Louvaen wrestled with the idea of warning Jimenin about the journey spell. If she did, he’d demand to know why she hadn’t told him before now, then interrogate her about her ability. She didn’t like him learning that her mother’s gift for sorcery allowed her to see magic when others couldn’t. She stayed quiet and gripped the saddle’s pommel in preparation for the transition from lowland forest to mountain woodland.
Her stomach hurtled into her throat before plummeting to her knees as they rode through the bespelled wall and into a blizzard’s white howl. She held her seat even as Jimenin fought to bring his panicked mount under control. Their ordered party disintegrated into a chaotic throng of yelling men and bucking horses. It took several minutes of Jimenin’s shouting and a few mad dashes into the trees before they found order. Louvaen peered into the snow-shrouded crowd, relieved to see her father had suffered nothing more than a scare. He sat pillion behind one of Jimenin’s minions, staring at her wide-eyed.
In the gray gloaming Jimenin’s face had taken on a feral look—lips peeled back from discolored teeth, pupils dilated so they darkened his eyes to a hollow black. He shook her. “What sorcery is this? Where are we?” The keening wind thinned his voice to a petulant whine.
Louvaen wiped snowflakes from her lashes and peered across the gorge to the structure perched on its spit of rock. She forgot the cold, the pain, the fear for her father and sister. Magic swamped her senses, and she gave a small sob. The flux had risen—not in slow tide but in a giant wave, battering everything around it. Blue sparks shot through the air, joined by undulating rivers of the same light that washed the castle and surrounding land. The drawbridge was lowered and the portcullis raised. Either Ketach Tor stood deserted, or they were expected. She wanted nothing more than to leap off Jimenin’s horse and race across the bridge. Somewhere in that battered fortress an equally battered man waited—completely mad, utterly inhuman.
At her silence, Jimenin pulled her hair. She hissed and pointed to the castle. “Ketach Tor,” she shouted above the wind. “You’ve reached Ketach Tor.”
He leaned into her, his mouth damp against her ear. “If this is a trick, I’ll butcher your father right here and toss the pieces into the ravine. Then I’ll turn my men on you. There are more than few here not so choosy as I. Any warm cunt will do. You’ll bleed to death in the snow—if you don’t freeze first.”
The shudder rising up from her toes to encompass every part of her body nearly toppled her from the horse. She congratulated herself for somehow keeping her voice steady. “The mirror’s beacon worked,” she said. That is the home of Gavin de Lovet.”
What he lacked in honor and morality, Jimenin possessed in leadership ability. In short order he’d gathered his men and ordered them across the drawbridge. They advanced slowly—Jimenin at the lead—and clopped over the bridge’s creaking wood. Huddled within her father’s thin cloak, Louvaen shivered and squinted into the snow flurries whirling around them. The weather hadn’t been so bad or so bitter when she left for Monteblanco, and she wondered if Ambrose had used his sorcery to strengthen winter’s last grip on Ketach Tor.
They crossed over the bridge, through the barbican, and into the deserted bailey without incident. While the wind had quieted from a wail to a moan, the snow fell heavy. The castle loomed above them, a wall of stone wrapped in twilight. A murmur rose to her right, sibilant and rustling. All the hairs on her nape stiffened. She knew that hated sound, and if the horses didn’t know it, they still recognized the threat of a predator. Jimenin’s mount shied sideways, and his ears flattened against his head. The other horses followed suit. Louvaen peered into the shadows and shrank away.
Isabeau’s malevolent roses had swallowed up half the bailey and nearly all the tower keep. Silhouettes of thorny vines snaked up the stones, spilling into the window of Ballard’s bedchamber. Those on the grounds swayed from side to side, their dark blooms like snapping jaws. Jimenin’s men made signs with their fingers to ward off evil and wondered aloud what black sorcery abounded in Ketach Tor.
“Hold your tongues and light some torches, you bunch of lobcocks,” Jimenin ordered. “I’ll not be chased off by some talking flower.” The strike of flint and the hiss of sparks on resinous pinewood heralded coronas of light that revealed the bailey’s dilapidated buildings and squirming roses. After a pause, Jimenin spoke. “Cinnia married for this?” he said in a sneering voice.
Louvaen was tempted to taunt him, to tell him the woman he so badly craved married de Lovet despite his apparent poverty because she loved him and would live in rags or alone before she’d surrender to Jimenin.
“Oh Cinnia,” he called out in a sing-song voice. “Come out, come out wherever you are.”
Louvaen held her breath as the flicker of candlelight suddenly appeared in a parchment covered window and the main doors creaked slowly open.
A slight figure holding the candle appeared in the doorway. Louvaen couldn’t help it. She cried out at the sight of her sister, cloaked and hooded. “Cinnia, stay inside!”
Jimenin shoved the barrel of one of his pistols into her uninjured side. “Shut up,” he said. He addressed the approaching figure once more. “Come and greet us, fair maiden. Your father and sister are eager to see you.”
Cinnia picked her way daintily across the bailey. Louvaen squinted and leaned forward for a better look. An aura of cerulean light surrounded Cinnia. The candle flame danced in the frigid wind, and for just a moment Ambrose’s face stared back at her from the hood’s shadows.
Louvaen jerked in surprise, deaf to Jimenin’s snarl that she keep still. She felt the change in her captor’s breathing—quick, eager breaths and the speedy rhythm of his black heart—as the sorcerer drew close. The false Cinnia raised her candle, revealing the lovely face which had brought them all to this point and place. The brown eyes were solemn, the full-lipped mouth unsmiling but still seductive. “Here I am, Don Jimenin,” she said in sugared tones that were all Cinnia and nothing of Ambrose. “What would you have of me?”
Not yet sure of his triumph nor fully ensnared by his prey’s beauty and proximity, Jimenin kept a firm grip on Louvaen and distance from Cinnia. “Where’s your husband, girl?”
Her eyes filled with tears. “He is dead, sir.”
This Cinnia might be an illusion, but the grief was real. Louvaen choked back a sob. Gavin was dead. And if he was dead, then so was Ballard. Something inside her cracked—the scab of an old wound made when she lost Thomas. Ballard’s death reopened it, and the wound hurt a thousand times worse. She’d been with Thomas when he died; she’d been tied to a tree or strapped to Jimenin’s horse when Ballard had succumbed, destroyed at last by his own hand or by his son. The roses had told the tale with their conquering of the tower keep, but she’d held onto a slim hope that the two men might be saved despite the flux flooding Ketach Tor. They had failed to break Isabeau’s curse. She stared at Ambrose disguised as Cinnia, at the bleak despair in his ensorcelled eyes. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “So very sorry.”
Another realization squeezed the last bit of air out of her lungs. With Gavin dead, what had happened to the real Cinnia?
Ambrose blinked long, tear-soaked lashes and gave a wordless nod. He turned his attention back to Jimenin. Louvaen couldn’t see the man’s face, but the satisfaction in his voice was clear enough. “That makes things much easier for everyone.” He lowered the pistol from Louvaen’s side. “You’ll switch places with your sister and leave with me. No struggle, no protest and I’ll let your father live.”
