His was not a large chamber, nothing too fancy, and he was grateful for this. Several windows let in what remained of the daylight. A warm fire crackled on the grate, with a comfortable chair pulled up next to it. The bed had been opened for him, a puffy goose down coverlet, soft pillows. Through a half-open door he saw a bathtub and thought with longing of his aching body immersed in hot water.
Crossing to the table where a cold repast had been laid out, he drained the goblet of wine and poured another from the stone decanter. Moving swiftly, then, before temptation had time to work on him, before the healers came and insisted on treating his wounds, he made his preparations.
The feather coverlet on the bed was too bulky for his needs, but he removed the warmly woven blanket underneath it, folded it, and put it into the backpack. Then he knotted the bread and cheese and cold meats that had been set out for him into a clean pillowcase and added that as well. He filled the canteen with cold water.
One more quick look around, and then he let himself out of the room, closing the door behind him. Careful not to make eye contact with anybody he passed, hoping not to be recognized, he worked his way downward through the winding corridors. After a few wrong turns, he found his way at last out of the castle and across the field to the path that had led him from the mazes of the Between into Surmise.
A strange anomaly, Surmise, woven into the fabric of both Dreamworld and the Between by the dark sorcery of Jehenna. George had shifted the weaving somehow, but it was still a thing that ought not to be. No door should stand open between Dreamworld and the Between, lest beings cross from there into Wakeworld. Only evil could come from such breaches of the doorways—as had been proven by the dragon that had found its way into Krebston.
In this moment, though, he was grateful that Vivian hadn’t had a chance to figure out how to reweave Surmise so that the breach would be healed. It was an easy matter to find the path, a winding way through old-growth forest. He consulted the map now etched in his memory, marking the next series of twists and turns that he might not miss them, and set out in a long, swinging gait.
If his guesses were correct, the sorceress would also be headed for the Black Gates. Very likely she would arrive long before him, might already be there. Even so. He must do something, take some action, and it was the only thing he knew to do.
Twenty-six
No.” Jared infused as much authority as he could into the word and tried to summon up a forbidding glare, but he was at a disadvantage. He lay flat on his back on a large four-poster bed. Most of him was discreetly tucked beneath a clean coverlet, but the wounded leg was stretched out and exposed like a science specimen, with three healers hovering over it. Vultures. Greedy, garrulous birds of prey, feasting on his misery and rotting flesh.
This was, he’d been told, Castle Surmise. The information rang true with certain dim recollections of dreams that he was attempting to suppress. What he didn’t know, no matter how hard he dug into his brain, both conscious and subconscious, was how he came to be in Surmise and under the care of the healers in the first place. His last clear memory was of lying on a dirty blanket on the makeshift stretcher Zee had cobbled together, jolting and bouncing over what he wanted to think of as rocks. But the shapes and colors were all wrong and the stink of decay still lingered in his nostrils. Bones, flesh . . .
“No,” he said again, tugging at the covers to twitch them up and over his leg.
Hands prevented him, and two voices said, in unison, “My Lord, the leg must come off.”
“If we do not amputate,” said the third voice, in the condescending tone of a long-suffering teacher to an unusually stupid pupil, “the contagion will spread and you will die.”
Jared shuddered at the thought of the disfigurement. There was an attorney in his office who was an amputee—had lost a leg along with a wife and child in a car accident. Jared had always been repelled and slightly sickened by the sight of the empty pant leg, would find himself imagining what the stump looked like, and then wishing he hadn’t.
“If I’m going to die, it will be with all of my limbs intact,” he said.
“Your leg is hardly what I’d call intact.” The youngest of the three, a curvaceous little blonde who couldn’t be more than eighteen, wrinkled up her nose. “It reeks of putrefaction. The muscle has melted away from the bone.”
In response, the dream memories forced their way into his consciousness. I would have owned her once. She would have done my bidding in all things, would have come into my bed at a single command and would not dare to complain if my whole body reeked like a corpse. Jared blinked as the thought went through him, foreign and familiar at once, leaving a trail of cold on the back of his neck that made him shiver.
One of the older healers, the woman, laid a work-worn hand on his forehead. The touch was soothing and cool, a gesture he’d seen repeatedly throughout his life and envied. No one had ever touched him that way, certainly not his mother. Vivian had come closest, but even Vivian, who so easily fell into a caretaker mode with everybody else, had never touched him in that way. She’d approached him cautiously at first, almost reverently, acolyte to priest rather than healer to patient. He’d liked that, the way she deferred, let him guide and direct and shape her.
Until something went wrong. In part it was medical school, and then working as a physician in the ER. She tasted power, leading her team, making decisions. Bit by bit she slipped away, finally moving to that godforsaken little town and telling him it was over. Jared knew he could have fixed it, though; he would have won her back given time. If Zee hadn’t come along and spoiled everything.
Jared’s hatred flared at the thought of Zee. It was bad enough that he’d stolen Vivian’s love, that he was fearless and strong and adept with a sword. The fact that Jared now owed the man his life was insufferable; he would rather die than look up in Zee’s face and see pity for his disfigurement.
“Fever,” the older woman was saying. “Treating it will do no good as long as the source of the infection remains.” She looked familiar, and he caught her hand and clasped it in one of his.
“Do I know you? Have we met?”
“Of course, Chancellor. I’m Nonette. I dealt with your—knife wound.”
Chancellor. Flashes of memory, blindingly vivid, then gone. Bowing deeply to a woman both sorceress and Queen. A black-and-white bird skewered on his sword. A fountain and the fragrance of roses in the dark. Vivian’s body beneath him on a stone bench, unwilling. Vivian stabbing a knife deep into the flesh of his buttocks.
Jared rubbed his forehead, fitful and confused. That couldn’t be right. Vivian would never hurt anybody. As for himself—an image of the Chancellor, blood spurting from his throat, hands grasping at nothing—turned his limbs to water.
It made no sense. He had clear memories of a regular life—his house, his office, the courthouse—normal activities for a law-abiding man. That’s what he’d really been doing. Not running around some fairy-tale kingdom with a bunch of magic rocks, raping and pillaging and feeding people to dragons.
On the other hand, he’d known exactly where to look for the spheres and the Key. And he recognized the healer, Nonette, clearly recalling every torturous spike of the needle as she sewed up the wound in his buttocks while he lay facedown on a hard mattress, humiliated and furious.
Make it stop. Please, make it stop. He twisted both hands in his hair and yanked until the pain made his eyes water, slamming the back of his head onto the bed, over and over.