"Another moment and I'd have butchered the gimp where he stood," Ryan spit, fingers clenching as he relived the moments in that long corridor. "But there was another sec man there, and he came from behind and pulled me away."
Krysty could catch the faint scent of fish roasting on the beach far below them. But she ignored it, wanting Ryan to finish the bleak tale to finish it and to exorcise it from his mind.
"I chilled the guard with one thrust to the heart. I felt... a moment of being sorry. His name was George Cross. A good man but... He fell all in a piece, dead before his body hit the stone flags of the passage. But he delayed me for the second that cost me this," Ryan said, touching the patch over his left eye. "And fucking nearly killed me."
As he half turned, Ryan had seen Harvey lunging toward his face, his own eyes exultant with a feral grin of triumph. The younger boy had tried to parry the knife thrust, but was too slow.
"I saw it, Krysty! Saw the knife. I can see it to this day if I close my eye, see the point of his dagger, like a needle tipped with fire. It came direct into my eye." He stopped and turned away from her, looking across the valley toward the sinking ball of the orange sun.
The knife had been well aimed. It slashed into the left eye so that the young Ryan Cawdor could hear the steel grating against the bone of the socket.
"No pain. Not a single bit of pain. It felt like hot water on my cheek, where the eye had burst open. No blood. Only a spot or two of blood. I nearly dropped my knife. Or it fell and I snatched it up... I don't remember which. Harvey slashed at me again, went for my other eye. He missed by... you can see for yourself. Opened up half my face like a butcher with a lamb's carcass. Then I bled. Fireblast! But I surely bled then, lover."
Half-blind, terrified and in dreadful pain from the gash across his face, Ryan Cawdor lashed out at the smirking, triumphant face of his crippled brother. He dealt him a lucky punch in the middle of his hooked nose and felt it crumple under the blow like a crushed egg.
"I ran. Down and up and along passages. I was near death from the loss of blood, blinded. Someone helped me. Kenny Morse? I don't know. Suddenly I was out of the house and across the moat. There was snow on my face, melting and running with the seeping crimson all over my neck and shirt. A howling wind blew through the pines on the far side of the valley away from the ville. And I was gone. Fifteen years old and I never went back. Never thought about going back. Not until now." He sat up and pulled on his shirt and coat. The evening chill was rising from the Hudson, and the sun had nearly gone down. "I can smell fish cooking."
"Want to go back? Go 'fore dark?"
"Yeah."
"Help me up, lover. Thanks. What happened back at Front Royal after you'd fled the place? That double-crazy Bochco said your father married again. And what about Harvey?"
"Not much to tell. Haven't heard much fresh until down in the swamps there."
There had been a purge. Harvey had convinced the ailing Baron Cawdor that his youngest son was a murderous renegade and he was named wolfshead so that every man's hand was against him. Several servants believed loyal to Ryan and to Morgan's memory were executed on the old gibbets. Kenny Morse was the first to go, shrieking defiance as his feet were kicked off the stool and he danced in the air.
Pecker Bochco had told them about the cobbles of the courtyard flowing inches deep in sticky blood that clotted and blocked the drains of the entire ville. He had also told Ryan and Krysty about the new Lady Cawdor.
She was a sluttish whore who had been used by Harvey, but whose strength of will and capacity for evil out-stripped the halting young man. She seduced Baron Cawdor, persuading the old man of her love for him. Ryan's father, by now, was slipping fast into dementia, finding it hard to tell fact from dream.
Lady Rachel Cawdor was plump and beautiful and just eighteen years old. She fed opiates to the old man so that he slept, then ran light-footed along the winding corridors to the bedroom of Harvey Cawdor.
They found that Ryan's father was more tenacious than they'd expected. He didn't die, despite being poorly fed and treated harshly by the girl-bride. Harvey drew back from butchering the frail old man, but his mistress did not.
One night, under the guise of playing a game of love, she cajoled the baron into letting her tie his hands and feet to the corners of their great four-poster, using cords of silk. She whispered, as she pulled the knots tighter, of the pleasures she would give him once he was her helpless slave. The silk was as thin as cotton, yet as strong as wire, and had been tied so tight that it bit into his wrinkled skin and drew blood from beneath his blackened nails.
Baron Cawdor tried to call out, realizing at that last awful moment that her intention was murder. But Rachel laughed at him, mocking him, even as she knotted a gag around his mouth, muffling his cries for aid.
She told him of her contempt for him as she climbed, naked, astride his chest, gripping him with her heels as though he were a horse. She told him of her lust for his son and of their vile and perverse pleasures together. As she leaned over him her breasts brushed his cheeks, her nipples swollen with her ruthless enjoyment of what she was doing to him. Rachel picked up a large satin pillow, holding it as she wriggled up his body.
Rachel placed the pillow tenderly over his face, leaning all her weight on top of it, whispering as she did so of how Harvey had murdered Morgan and how he had planned to kill Ryan, but the brat had escaped.
She felt the struggles against the suffocating pressure becoming weaker until, with a final jerking convulsion, Baron Titus Cawdor went to join his ancestors.
Ryan and Krysty picked their way down the twisting path through the woods, taking care as the light was fading fast.
"And they have a son?"
Ryan nodded. "That's what I heard. Jabez Pendragon Cawdor. Must be around the same sort of age as Whitey down there."
Krysty sniffed the air. "Gaia, but that fish makes my mouth water! You feeling hungry now, lover? After all your exercise?"
Ryan checked in midstride, turning to look at her, his face a pale blur in the half-light. The patch over his ruined eye seemed blacker than it usually did. He reached out and took Krysty by the hand.
"I'm sure."
"What? That you're hungry?"
Ryan didn't smile. "No."
"What, then?"
"That crazy old bastard Bochco. I've been thinking on the last thing he said."
"What was that?"
Ryan's voice was so quiet that the pounding waterfall nearly drowned it out. Even with her mutie hearing, Krysty could barely hear him.
"The crow shits where the eagle should roost. Return and claim what should be yours."
"I remember."
"It was a scar that had been healed, I thought, for twenty years. Now I know that I was wrong. Now I know where I'm going."
"Where?" But she knew.
"I'm going home, lover. Home."
They walked back to the beach and rejoined the others.
Chapter Eight
Dot Tanner was straining at his memory. "Front Royal's in Virginia. There used to be a saying."
"What?" Lori asked.
"Something about the state. They said it in the nineties. Nineteens, not eighteens."
Jak Lauren was leaning against the short trunk of the mast, listening to the old man. "What did they say, Doc?"
"Ah, yes." Confidently he said, "Virginia is for..." Then he lost the thread. "Virginia is for... for... I don't rightly recall."
Jak grinned. "Guess must have been Virginia is for killers."
Doc nodded. "Quite possibly, my white-haired young companion. Quite possibly."
Ryan had told them over the supper of fresh trout that he was determined to go on to Virginia.