Ten

At the best of times, Loch Arach was a large place. Now the halls and stairs stretched themselves out, almost infinitely long, taunting Cathal with their distance. Given what he’d just seen, he knew the sense of Sophia’s request that her laboratory be far from anyone’s lodging. All the same, as he strode through the corridors, he wished for a minute that he’d denied it and quartered her in one of the rooms next to Fergus, explosions be damned.

Sophia herself kept up better than Cathal would have thought. Potion covered, wrapped, and held firmly in both hands, she was only a foot or two behind every time he glanced back toward her. She didn’t complain or ask him to slow down either, though he did the first time he noticed that her speed came with a price. She was taking two or three steps to every one of his, and by the time they’d descended the staircase, she was showing it. Black curls were emerging from the sides of her wimple, her cheeks were flushed red-bronze, and her breasts rose and fell rapidly.

Even hurrying, even with two layers of wool and some pretense at courtesy in the way of his view, Cathal noticed these things. The lust that had started in the laboratory, at the nearness of her body and the feel of her small hand in his, still sent its tendrils outward through his body. He could ignore them better when he was walking. When Sophia had leaned toward his touch, eyes closed and lips parted in relief, his body had come to full wakefulness after the winter’s sleep. With an urgent errand before him and the castle full of people around him, he was still half hard from looking at her, still conscious of every breath of hers that reached his ears.

Triumph fed desire. He’d known that for years.

Had he forgotten the feel of it? He didn’t remember the aftermath of battle ever being quite so heated, or quite so intoxicating. There had been joy, yes, and lust when the women were willing and comely, but the temptation of Cathal’s memories had never been quite as intense as what filled him on the way to Fergus’s chambers.

Then again, he’d always been able to satisfy those urges quickly. The women he wanted had always been available. Since leaving youth for manhood, he’d taken care to ensure that. He’d been careful where he set his eyes and where he let his thoughts stray; he never stood too close or talked too long to a woman whose affections weren’t for sale in some way. Poets could talk all they wanted of courtly love, but pining after the moon was a silly modern notion. It would never last, and it, by God’s eyes, wasn’t for Cathal.

Now, perhaps, life had forced him into the situation he’d tried to avoid. That wouldn’t be new. At least there were advantages to this particular unlooked-for complication. If Sophia wasn’t for him, still she was pleasant to look at, and temptation was as enjoyable as satisfaction from time to time. If the potion worked, she would be gone before desire became torment.

In his right mind, Cathal told himself, he would find that an unmixed blessing.

Less mixed, at any rate. He wasn’t a saint or even a monk, had never had any aspirations along that line, and a strictly practical life would have been boring.

He grabbed the reins of his thoughts and pulled them away from his groin just before he and Sophia reached the doorway to Fergus’s room.

Either a helpful friend or her own exhaustion had sent Sithaeg elsewhere. The girl beside Fergus was Janet, one of the kitchen wenches. She gave Cathal and Sophia a startled look but spoke no word, only rose, bowed, and got out of the way.

“You should likely leave,” Sophia said with an apologetic smile, “just in case.”

Neither did Janet ask in case of what? If she was a smart girl, she probably didn’t want to know. With another bow, she was out the door before Sophia and Cathal made it to the side of Fergus’s bed.

Duty, weariness, and his own aversion to watching futility had kept Cathal from visiting more than once in the last few days, and that had only been a swift look in. He’d felt guilty about that. Now he thought it had been wise. In the aftermath of Sophia’s cool annoyance, not to mention the proof of how dangerous her task could be, he saw that Valerius’s note had clouded his judgment, as the sorcerer might have intended. Had Cathal spent more time watching his friend’s decline, cloud might have become full eclipse.

In the afternoon light, even dimmed and scattered by the windows, he could see through Fergus’s skin. The shapes of muscle and tendon in his hands were milky and vague; his bones were more solid, like tiny chips of pearl caught in ice. The flesh of his arms was more translucent yet.

Fergus’s face was a skull, only faintly veiled, and his closed eyes were pools of milky water.

Cathal swore in Gaelic. Beside him he heard Sophia gasp, as she’d done the night she’d first seen Fergus, but her voice was less startled and more appalled when she spoke. “God’s wounds!”

“You don’t believe in those,” Cathal said, unsure whether it was joke or accusation, only reaching for anything that wasn’t the man before him.

“Belief has nothing to do with profanity,” she replied, and Cathal could hear her controlling her voice, going from ragged to clipped with every word. “I’ll need you to hold him up, since I sent the maid away.”

“Aye,” Cathal said and knelt. The floor was hard and cold on his knees. He welcomed the solidity, even the pain; he cursed the contrast between it and the body he took hold of. Putting an arm around Fergus’s back was still possible, but the flesh itself had a wispy feel, and while Cathal’s hand didn’t go through his old friend’s shoulder, it felt as if it might at any moment.

Only the barest movement, the faintest sound, indicated that Fergus still breathed.

Have you reconsidered yet?

His whole body clenched, chest and throat and guts, a feeling he knew well from the heart of battle.

Fighting would do no good now. He wished, bitterly, that the situation were otherwise, that this was a problem he could solve with fist in face, sword in chest, teeth in throat. Remembering where he was, keeping his hands and arms gentle was all he could manage.

Physically, propping Fergus’s head up was no effort at all. Sophia could have managed it. A child might have been equal to the task. For Cathal, it was a joke. He had only to kneel, and wait, and keep still. Unable to look at Fergus’s face for very long, he watched Sophia instead. Also kneeling, across the bed from him, she unwrapped the potion with deliberate care.

This was not the time or place to get slipshod. Haste wouldn’t help anyone.

Telling himself these things helped a little. Cathal took a slow breath in and let it out, on impulse letting it power a series of quick words in Latin, phrases that he’d learned in youth and used rarely. The world shifted around him: magic overlay familiar objects in washes of color and light. Magic was no weapon of his and didn’t come easily to his hand, but he knew enough to let it provide warning in case the potion flamed up again, or exploded, or attracted unwelcome attention. Glancing at Sophia’s bandaged hand, he wished he’d thought to do as much earlier.

The shades around her were dawn-pink, he noticed, but the goblet was more dramatic by far. It, or the substance inside it, or both, glowed as if Sophia held the sun itself in her hand. When she set it to Fergus’s mouth, gentle as she was, Cathal went absolutely still, every muscle tense.

Enough mind, or perhaps just reflex, remained that Fergus opened his mouth at the touch of the metal. Sophia tipped the goblet forward, as slowly as she’d done everything since they’d entered the room, and the potion flowed bit by bit down Fergus’s throat. His flesh, sparse and translucent as it was, hid the glowing liquid from view, and for a short time there was no sign that anything had happened at all.

Sophia righted the goblet and stood, her face set in the blank expression of one determined not to let disappointment show.

Beneath Cathal’s hand, Fergus’s shoulder felt suddenly warmer than it had a moment before. Even as he flexed his fingers, testing whether the sensation was real or his own imagining, the heat grew. A glow, subtler than the potion’s, spread out from Fergus’s throat, banishing the pallor of his skin and turning his flesh substantial where the light touched.

Not daring to speak, Cathal felt an incredulous smile widen across his face, moving, it felt, with the shining effects of the potion. He heard the sound of a single harp string, faint at first and then growing. The glow reached Fergus’s chin and his shoulders, then passed upward over his cheeks and outward to his arms.

In an instant, it stilled. The sound cut off. A wind from nowhere brought a chill and the smell of grave dust, and the light of the potion went out.

Fergus’s eyes opened, a washed-out version of the merry brown ones Cathal had known: washed-out and now wide with terror and urgency. “Hhhh…” His voice came dusty from a disused throat.

Cathal crossed himself. Sophia stood with her hands at her sides, struck dumb and motionless. Fergus’s throat worked, his lips writhed, and finally he managed speech.

“He. Wizard. He has me. In his grasp. Grip is…tight.” Those pale eyes found Cathal’s face and focused. “Captain.”

“I’m here,” Cathal said, and his hand tightened. The flesh beneath it was still more solid than it had been, but what comfort was that next to the horror in his friend’s expression? “We’re…”

We’re what? He could in truth promise nothing—no rescue, no salvation, not even a quick death, for Cathal knew not what happened to the soul of a man killed under such a spell, and what he imagined was all hideous. He could but promise effort, and what earthly good was that?

And so he would lie. He’d done that before. You’ll be fine, lad. We turned the bastards. We’re safe. We won. The phrases came to his lips more easily than the paternoster. This time, the words would just be more complicated and not entirely false. They wouldn’t give up; they were working on the problem. All he had to do was leave out a few details.

Cathal opened his mouth and saw that there was no need to say anything. Fergus’s eyes were closed again, and his jaw hung limp. He still breathed, and he still had the measure of solidity that the potion had given him back, but no more. His hands were yet half fog, his closed eyes pallid wisps in an otherwise solid face, and the spirit that had briefly animated him had vanished once again.

Now Cathal knew where it had gone or—he feared, more accurately—where it had been dragged.