«Finist. Finist, hear me.»
The falcon stirred as something touched it. Frightened, it weakly tried to bite, to claw, but the something was holding it fast, the something was making odd sounds, over and over…
«Finist. Yes, look at me, look at me. You are Finist. Remember, you are Finist.»
Finist. Something stirred in the avian mind. Finist. Once, it seemed, it might have borne a different form… Finist. Once, it might have had a different self… Once, it had been more than bird, much more, once it had been—
«Finist.»
The falcon-shape blurred and was gone. Human once more, the prince lay where he'd fallen, naked and torn, too sick with shock and pain and weariness to move, wondering feverishly where he was, how he'd gotten here, remembering almost nothing of that nightmarish flight. Someone was gently slipping a caftan about him, but the touch of even that soft silk against the ugly gashes across his chest and upper arms made him gasp in pain and look up. Through the reddish haze of rising fever, he saw Ljuba, and some ingrained sense of wariness wanted him to pull away. But he was past the point of escape.
«Cousin.» His voice was a dry, anguished gasp. «Help…»
«Oh, I shall, Finist. Believe me, I shall.»
She smiled at him. And the sight of that smile, sly, cruel, and possessive, was the last thing Finist saw before darkness took him.
Chapter XXXI
Decisions
Maria! Maria, save me! Kirtesk— Seek me‑My love! Save me!
Those scraps of anguished thoughts echoing in her mind, Maria dragged herself up through layers of sleep to a dazed awakening, head aching, throat dry, vaguely aware that something was terribly wrong.
With a great effort, she managed to swing heavy, barely responsive legs over the side of the bed and sat up, so dizzy she thought she'd be sick, feeling as though she had been drugged…
That goblet of milk… that odd-tasting milk Vasilissa had insisted she drink! It must have held a sleeping potion, And, judging from the way she felt, she was probably meant to sleep right through until midday, but… Maria blinked at the predawn sky. Vasilissa plainly hadn't known how to calculate the proper dosage.
Akh, I'm lucky she didn't poison me. Though why she would want to drug me …
Somehow her sister's motives just didn't seem so urgent, not compared to the dream… If only she could remember—there was something about that dream…
Confused, Maria struggled to her feet. The cold night air would help revive her. The window-She stopped short, staring at the bizarre wooden cross that blocked the opening. Moving warily closer, Maria realized she was looking at two crossed laths, their ends jammed firmly into the windowframe. They could only have been put there by Vasilissa once she'd known Maria was safe in drugged sleep. As a bewildered Maria stared more closely, horror swept the residue of slumber from her mind, because the laths were studded with spikes, cruel iron spikes that were dark with blood.
«Finist…»
It was his blood, she knew that as surely as she knew anything at all! Finist had come back to her and not seen the trap in the darkness, and she'd not been awake to warn him—oh, dear God, did he think she'd set the trap? Did he think she'd tried to kill— To kill! No, no, he wasn't dead, he couldn't be dead!
And then, cutting through the rising panic, came the memory of her dream. All at once Maria knew it hadn't been a dream at all, but Finist's desperate cry to her, and she could have sobbed aloud because at least it meant he must still be alive. But that cry:
Kirtesk— Seek me‑My love! Save me!
Maria straightened. Whether he'd meant it or not, behind those broken, pain-wracked words, there had been a second, even more alarming message. About… Ljuba?
Ljuba, yes. In their time together, Finist had, of course, told Maria something about his lands, light, amusing tales of Kirtesk, of his people, his boyars—and of Ljuba, his cousin, his sorcerous, ambitious cousin. At the time his voice had seemed a little too light to be convincing, a little too casual.
And in that faint, second layer of dream‑message, Finist had plainly feared that in his weakened state he would fall under his cousin's control. If she could control Finist, she could control Kirtesk as well. That had been his greatest fear, for his people. It seemed that since they had been exposed to magic all their lives, the folk of Kirtesk had become attuned to it, enough for them to have lost the resistance to sorceries usually present in the human mind. They'd be easy targets for Ljuba. The desperate message had been clear enough about that: Only an outsider, with that natural resistance still intact, could hope to stay free of sorcerous seduction long enough to stop Ljuba.
Me? Maria shuddered in sudden, cold terror. Against sorcery … A chasm seemed to open up before her, a chasm filled with all the horrors of the dark, frightening unknown…
But her glance fell to the cruel iron spikes and their grim stains, and Maria drew herself slowly erect. No time now to indulge her fears. And she was no longer the girl she had been, not after the ordeal of exile, not after the joy of Finist.
If only I'd been brave enough to go with him when he asked, to wed him, none of this would have happened.
The thought of Finist—poor Finist, alone and wounded, and in God knew what peril… She had always thought those tales of folk willing to actually die for love only so much melodrama, but now she realized that life without Finist truly wouldn't be worth the living.
All right. If she didn't gather the shreds of her courage together and do something, Finist was lost. It was as simple as that.
The door creaked softly open, and Vasilissa began to tiptoe in, candle in hand, only to stop short at the sight of Maria grimly facing her.
«Checking up on your handiwork, Lissa?»
«I don't know what you mean.»
«No? Do you usually wander about the house at this hour?»
«No! I just… didn't think you'd be awake yet. I mean, I was only looking to see — "
«If your trap had worked?» Maria cut in quietly. «Trap? What — "
«Enough, Lissa! Why did you do it? Were you so envious? So jealous? In God's name, Lissa, why?»
«For you!» Vasilissa cried. «For the sake of your soul!»
That surprised Maria. «Now what nonsense are you — "
«It's true!» her sister screamed. «It's true‑Maria, you never would have seen the truth in time! That was no man, that was a demon, a devil! He would have ravaged you, body and mind! But I saved you! An—an angel told me what to do, and I saved you!» An angel told her. «Akh, Lissa…» Sick at heart,
Maria bit back tears. How could she hate Vasilissa for being what she was? «Lissa, I know you meant well. But now, go back to bed. Please. Just… go back to bed.»
«You'll be all right?»
«I'll be fine. Lissa — "
«No, wait! First, let's both kneel and say a prayer of thanksgiving for — "
«What in the name of Heaven is going on?» asked a sudden, stern voice, and Maria sighed.
Wonderful, just wonderful. Vasilissa's hysterics had awakened Danilo. «It's nothing, Father. Lissa was only… dreaming.»
She gave her sister a warning glance, but of course, Vasilissa ignored it. «No," she insisted angrily, «it wasn't a dream! Father, Maria was consorting with a—a devil, but I saved her!»
«A devil!» Danilo repeated, amazed. But his face darkened with dawning anger. «A lover, you mean!»
«No," protested Maria. «It wasn't — "