Slim, smooth-muscled thighs quivered. Realizing only now that they were braced wide apart and that her knees were pressed against the cavern wall, Samaire thought on that. No intuitive leap aided her; she was forced to labour through the entire thinking process.
Aye. Her wide-braced legs lowered her posture, and thus added to the burden of her arms. She willed aching muscles to serve her. They complained. She winced and a little groan escaped her when she straightened, bringing her legs together. Gods be thanked, they were not bound!
Other sinews shrieked, for now her elbows were able to bend, however slightly, and every long-strained muscle in each arm hurled icy stabs of pain along its length and into her torso. Her shoulders burned. Both hands remained bound above the level of her head.
And then it occurred to her, with the return of full intelligence and ability to reason, to wonder. About the torches, about the who-she wondered where he was, and that thought was like a cruel hand that clutched at her stomach from within.
Her mouth was open to call out. She reconsidered, and compressed her lips.
Not knowing who had strangled her into unconsciousness and bound her here, or why, she held herself in check. There was determination upon her not to be some pleading quavery-voiced captive. She was Samaire of Leinster, she was a weapon-woman of Eirrin, and she did not speak until she knew she could trust her voice and had chosen her words.
“It’s awake I am. Which am I to be, raped or tortured? Or do we continue with the cowardice of you behind me in silence?”
Her voice was hollow in the cavern, and it welled about her like a physical object. She was grateful for the sound.
No voice answered.
It was then she heard the leathery rustling sound, the little snap from well behind her, followed closely by the fweep noise that was as of a rushing arrow cleaving the air. Nor had she time to flinch or tense before the loud cracking sound came. It was so loud and close to her ears, taking her so by surprise that she gasped and lurched painfully against the wall.
For just an instant there was the feeling as of ice on her back.
Then sudden white-hot pain burst there. It engulfed her back in a blazing agony that misted her mind. Her eyes opened wide and stared, bulging, at nothing. Her breath exploded from her in an ugly grunt. Involuntary tears rushed hot down her cheeks in a watery cascade. She jerked violently and tried to put back her shoulderblades against the pain. She felt her knees buckle at the sudden weakness the pain imbued, but at the same time she knew there was no escape, nowhere to go, nothing she could do about the pain-and that which was to come. She knew what she’d felt, what had been done to her.
She had been struck with a whip.
Now she felt it slither down her back, catch for a moment on the shelf of her backside, and drop from her.
The agonized woman’s skin rippled and tensed with sudden desperate efforts to break free. The ropes only chewed remorselessly at her wrists when she tried to jerk her way to freedom. She could not. The awful thought struck her that the raw pain and sudden warmth at her wrists meant that the ropes had bitten in, that each torn wrist was now streaming blood.
She could not tear free. She had accomplished only the spilling of her own blood.
Again the vicious lash came, a leather serpent that dashed onto her shoulder this time, and again her eyes snapped wide and spurted tears and her body lurched from the fiery caress. It was all she could do to keep from screeching as new searing fire tore through her.
Silent and unseen, her captor struck again.
The sinews of Samaire’s arms and thighs and calves knotted and bulged outward at the strain, for she could riot help tugging at her bonds. Her chest ground painfully into stone and stone-hard earth. She knew that rivulets of blood streaked her arms. Constant shudders of pain and anguish twitched through the flesh of her beaten body, and she knew frustration with the pain, and then anger.
I will not be reduced.
Even with that determined vow she felt a blow of monstrous agony between her shoulders. A lancing pain began there and raced down to her heels and out to the tips of her flexing fingers. Surely she’d not have been stung so had a knife transpierced her. Again the lash hissed downwards, streaking through the air to streak her skin with scarlet.
Now the first whip-cut was a pleasant memory, a sweet caress compared with the fifth, which cut across her full calves. She felt the quivering of her every nerve, from scalp to toenails. The pain in her lungs seemed more severe than it had while she was strangled. Ignominy struck with the whip, for her body failed her and released the valve of her kidneys.
The rushing leathern lash struck, and struck again, and then again until the white-faced victim knew she was crossed and crisscrossed with purple-red welts that were like ugly serpents writhing across her scarified flesh.
A princess born, she had never known such pain and terrible anguish, mental and physical. She felt as if she would surely burst in the internal parts of her body.
Samaire’s determination held. Not giving the unseen him the satisfaction of making her cry out became the sole object of her concentration, the entire purpose of her existence. When she realized on the fiery falling of, the twelfth or twentieth lash that she had emitted a groaning sound, she mentally cursed its utterance. To prevent repetition, she thrust her tongue between her teeth and clamped. She held it there with no care whether she bit through.
Every stroke seemed to penetrate more deeply into her flesh, and now the filthy jackal behind her was aiming his lash so as to torment her with the most reviling violation of her body.
Samaire felt as if she had lived all the time of this life in pain and torture, and that the time when existence was painless, much less pleasurable, was but a dimly-remembered fantasy. The whip hissed and cracked.
Who and why no longer mattered. Nothing mattered. Relief, perhaps: death would bring that. For she knew that he was leaving bloody gashes on what had been the white flesh of her body.
Maintaining silence with an effort of sheer will and a surely ridiculous determination, she sobbed without sound at the agony in her back and shoulders, the throbbing in her wounded haunches and legs, the wounds that quivered and swelled and seethed with a liquid fury-while leaking forth the blood of life. She could feel it trickling in warm rivulets that went swiftly cold and thick.
Nameless and nigh-mindless, the victim knew that she was washed with crimson, that she would soon bleed to death. She wished sincerely that she had died before, of strangulation. Logic had left her, and Samaire’s thought was only that it was not fair that one should be made to die twice.
The princess of Leinster knew the absolute depths of human despair as she felt her skin being flayed off by the cruel whip. From tear-dimmed eyes she stared at nothing. Shaking in constant spasms, her body moved weakly. She ground herself against the wall hewn from stone and earth as though that pain could alleviate the other. Desperately she reminded herself to keep her blood-washed thighs together.
In silence, unseen and unknown, he struck on.
Idiot, she thought incongruously, that stripped a woman and beat her, rather than used her!
A new, surely insane thought filled her reeling mind: She was bitterly sorry not to be able to aid Cormac in his struggle against the undying wizard Thulsa Doom, not even to be able to be with him… and then she broke, and Samaire of Leinster tore her body against the stone wall of the cavern while she screamed and screamed.
Chapter Fourteen: