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XVII. In the Caves



Bits of the deeper caves flashed past him—other small chambers, some occupied by other couples. Couples—was he with someone? He imagined—hoped—it might be Isabella, because she sparred with him, her tongue sharp with wit, and wasn’t that what appealed? It had been the same with Janet through the years . . . Should he tell her that? Probably not.

But, no, it couldn’t be Isabella, because she’d left The Pilgrim. Then he’d sat down again, and . . . No idea. The figure he leaned on wore a striped cap—the same doxy? Or was she with Will and this a different one? He remembered he should guard his purse, but his arms didn’t seem to work.

Whispers asked questions of him as he stumbled along. How many outlaws were in the tavern today? Was he or “the other one”—did she mean Will?—involved in the theft on the highway? Did he know someone who was? He caught mention of a bishop, of Leicester, of a Simon de Montfort, and the name D’Everingham, but the names blew away as if they’d leaked out around the questions. This was nothing like overhearing the Norman sheriff—that had been a true aberration. Thomas had been in the company of skinwalkers before without the slightest hint of connection to some sleeping Yvag. Passelewe’s inner voice had been all the more startling for that, as if Thomas had interrupted a communion. As if he’d overheard God speaking and God had taken note of him because neither he nor God expected the other. His thoughts were so tangled anyway, providing no answers. Isabella had made him long for Janet, for intimacy with someone, a settled life, and this dominated his thoughts. He sensed the questioner’s frustration with him, and laughed—at least in his head he laughed. He should pay attention to right now, but his thoughts slid askew.

He wasn’t sure when or how he arrived in the small, very dark chamber. The world tipped and he slid into its corner.

He landed unceremoniously upon a straw-filled bed. The room was nearly circular; he wasn’t alone but couldn’t locate the doxy now. It was as if she’d become shadow. He should listen for Yvags, but the thought escaped him.

Fingers unlaced, undressed him. His eyes refused to focus, and anyway most of whatever was happening rushed past with a roar, so he gave in and let the current take him. At some point golden eyes that were too large and not at all human peered closely at him. He might have cried “Yvag!” but his mouth wasn’t obeying him now, either.

Then began the nightmare: He’d been returned to Ailfion, where he was being ridden by Nicnevin again, that grotesque Queen of Hell. She took him; her torso shifted somewhere between human and eel while it slapped against him. Golden eyes burned lustrous in the light of candles, the rings of black pupil full wide; eager, lustful the way all Yvagvoja seemed to be once they cracked open a human body—as if they were tasting sex for the first time, unbridled and depraved. The Queen in her own body was like that, and in all the bodies she wore, bodies of those who mattered to him, who lived in his thoughts. They were stripped out and used against him. She warped and poisoned them all. As it had been with Nicnevin, beside him or above or below him in alternate moments he saw the doxy, the one who dallied with Will Scathelock, but human no more. She plucked Janet from out of him, and then Morven, to which he reacted so violently that this dissolved, transmuting into Innes, but Innes as an Yvag so that he hardly recognized her; she glared at him, lusted for him, used him the way her queen had. Finally she condensed into a distorted version of the leader of the Keepers. Isabella Birkin? It seemed she found that amusing. He reeled from the shifting faces pressing their lips to his, triumphantly meeting his gaze. His desire, for so long dormant, was like something that had fallen down a well long ago and been lost. But before this deformed Isabella, her shape all wrong, grotesque, he screamed, or thought he did. Nightmare blurred. It never gave him purchase before it changed again. Despite the horror of the offering, he wanted Isabella, though he hadn’t until now allowed that he might feel anything for anyone ever again. Lust devoured guilt, while Scathelock’s words “Isabella fans no flames” echoed through his head like a great bell tolling. Fans no flames, fans no flames. She was an inhuman Isabella, untouchable, yet coupling with him nevertheless, and all the while whispering her questions: Where are the dights? Who has them? Where have they hidden them? He could not answer, too full of his own rekindled desire, which must be the impossible perverting ache that an Yvagvoja felt. The questions blew past him, trailed by the same names again, Leicester, D’Everingham, de Montfort. He knew D’Everingham was married to Isabella Birkin, but the latter name seemed familiar, too. Who else had mentioned it before? But there was Isabella right in front of him.

Halfway between memory and dream, he watched the distorted Isabella lean close, and then it was Innes sinking her needle teeth into him until the carnal venom trickled from his wound. Why Innes again? Dead so long. How could the doxy be doing this? Capable, like the elven queen, of taking so many eager shapes?

She ran her tensile fingers over him as if she couldn’t touch him enough. And though her touch pulsed with more lust, he was able to reject it as he was able to reject her questions.

Whatever she’d done to him, it masked her true nature as it hid what was happening—was she even fucking him? She plucked at his strings, distorted whatever she found, made it seem he was victim to Nicnevin again.

This time she heard the name, his acknowledgment of the damned Queen. She scrutinized him anew.

He fought to swim up out of the nightmare before he drowned in it.

Think! Not a skinwalker: She had those teeth, that venom the same as the Queen’s. He tried to pull that realization into focus, but her needle-sharp teeth bit his lip and her lust surged like blood through his body again. His own blood ran down his shoulder. He hadn’t dreamed the bite, but he was helpless in its thrall.

Speculations and doubts sailed on without him. No more questions from her, either. Everything funneled into sensation, down into the well again. This time they fucked and tangled and clawed for purchase. A solitary question rang in the darkness now: “How do you know her?”

At some point the candle must have guttered, but everything for him had gone dark already. Blind, in cold terror, he lay paralyzed, certain that when the light returned, he would be in his cell next to Taliesin, and all of this life he’d known and believed would be revealed as nothing but an insane prisoner’s dream of escape, or a side effect of her venom.

The smell of her on him wrenched him awake. Not since his captivity in Ailfion had he smelled the tart sex odor of that gender of Yvag. He’d thought it belonged to Nicnevin alone.

One dim candle lit the small chamber. It stood on a shelf carved out of the opposite wall. He lay sprawled naked on a straw mattress on the floor, in deep shadow. Stripped from him, his clothes in a heap on the dark floor had transformed back into Hodde’s cotehardie and leggings. How long would the glamouring have lasted? Not long, once he lost consciousness. But she hadn’t noticed.

In the shadows beside him, the Yvag perched on the cheap bedding. She’d given up the façade of the blond doxy but still maintained the girl’s form—a human physique but mottled gray and rough. She leaned back on her hands, one leg folded forward, her toes teasing his erection with a human foot. She still wore the striped coif. It made her look like a hooded falcon on a tree branch contemplating the field mouse she was just about to consume. Her back was to his unglamoured clothes. He tasted blood—she’d bitten his lip—glanced down to confirm the second bite in his shoulder.

She wasn’t using mere glamour. This was what Nicnevin called reshaping. He could do it, too, though it exhausted him a thousandfold more than simple glamouring, and it could be agony to be something far from one’s true self—a sheep, for instance. He remembered. For her it didn’t seem any effort at all. She was comfortably halfway between human and Yvag.

“So you’re a companion to outlaws, and I’ve got you.” She pushed herself up and knelt over him on all fours. “But you thought of the Queen. I saw her clearly in your mind. When did she take you? Who are you?”

Her face, directly over his, was the mottled green-gray of an Yvag, with prominent cheeks, a chin elongated and thorny, and large golden eyes. Her metallic hair curtained his view. Staring up at her, he sucked in a breath, but clearly failed to express the shock he should have, the shock she was expecting. Any innocent captive would have been screaming.

When her mouth opened, the teeth were tiny and sharp. She continued to mask herself in female form, almost as if she’d taken a liking to it, the way Yvagvoja enjoyed coitus. Her face continued to remind him too much of Innes, his long-dead sister, as if having borrowed Innes from his memories, she’d decided to adopt her features. But why? Why maintain that façade out of all those she’d selected? He dismissed the likeness then, arguing that he could barely recall Innes’s real face any longer. But in truth, this creature had pulled Innes and Janet into focus again. He might have thanked her for those brief glances if he didn’t intend to kill her at his first opportunity.

She ducked her head and ran her tongue along his neck, repeated the questions she’d asked him before. “Where are the dights? And how is it you see the Queen?” The playfulness of the question did not quite hide the surging temper underneath it.

He shook his head. There was no answer he could make that wouldn’t deliver his true identity. He glanced again at his clothes. She wasn’t interested in them.

“When were you her toy?” Her fingers gripped his chin and cheeks. She was strong. She could crush his jaw. “I would know of it.”

“So would I if you’re offering an explanation. I’m not given to consorting with demons, succubus.”

She shoved his face away. “Oh. But with whores you don’t mind.”

He gave a shrug. “You used sorcery. Potions rob one of any choice. I did drink a potion you intended for Will Scathelock, didn’t I?” It was what Little John or one of the devout Waits might have claimed.

“They all will have their turn. So, I’m a succubus, am I? You’re no more shocked at that possibility than at a dragon flying down a chimney. No, I think you are not what you seem, and I will have an answer to my questions whether you give it freely or not.” She stared. He said nothing. “No? Well, we’ll soon know everything about you.”

She rolled away from him and stood. She held up a flexible Yvag suit of armor and stepped into it. It simply surged up her body. Again, he knew he wasn’t reacting like someone who’d never encountered the malleable armor of Yvag knights before. Whether it was the aftereffects of whatever she’d poured in the ale, or an inability after so long in isolation to feign any emotional response, the result was the same: He was convincing her of his own unnaturalness.

A moment later, she was the doxy again, clothed in a long-sleeved green kirtle. As nonchalantly as possible, he reached for his own clothes. As he picked up each item, he colored it—ochre leggings and indigo cotehardie. As she made no comment regarding them, he guessed they had been stripped from him in the dark, with such focused lust on her part that she hadn’t noticed their alteration when cast aside.

His bow and belt with quiver lay against the wall. The Yvag had taken his purse of winnings. At least she hadn’t dug into the quiver, where she would have found two Yvag daggers and his ördstone. She seemed dismissive of him now, certain that he posed no threat even if he knew of Nicnevin. She also seemed to be awaiting something.

As he laced the cotehardie, he learned what that was: Two of the Norman sheriff’s guards arrived. The small chamber couldn’t fit four without forcing Thomas to stand on the mattress. He had his bow at hand but no space to string or use it, and the soldiers had swords drawn already.

The Yvag told them, “Take him to Passelewe. Put him in a cell with the other one. I’ll join you as soon as I’ve interrogated his allies.” They closed on him. “And here, Simforax, his purse. Share it with the human guards.” She tossed the winnings to the nearest one, bearded Simforax.

In that instant he sprang. He shoved her aside and grabbed the leather purse, then drove his fist straight into Simforax’s face. The bearded knight fell into the second one, and Thomas heaved both of them out of his way and on top of the doxy. Behind him, she shrieked in fury.

Diving out the door, he found himself in a weaving tunnel full of carved-out doorways. Turning left, he ran down a sloping path and into a semicircular cellar cave with a knee-high thrall along the curved walls, on top of which stood barrels, a ring of them all around the room, and disappearing where the thrall curved out of sight. The bend proved to be a dead end, just more elevated barrels. He turned about, and concentrated upon glamouring himself as one of the other archers he’d competed against that day. Then he walked back out into the tunnel, where he pretended to lurch unsteadily along, back the way he’d just come.

Barely a moment later, the two sheriff’s guards burst into the tunnel. The first knocked him aside; the second one, Simforax, grabbed his shoulder and spun him around, pausing to give a baleful look at this flaxen-haired and inebriated bowman, eyeing him from head to foot with clear frustration at what he saw. The angry chirring thoughts of an Yvag assailed Thomas but he kept himself closed off. The guard shoved him away and bounded ahead after his companion. If he’d any doubt that a soldier named Simforax was Yvag, that doubt vanished with the two soldiers.

Thomas quickly wove his way to the right this time, eventually turning into a corridor full of support columns, one with a cross etched in it. To the left the path sloped down; to the right carved steps led up to a closed door, and he headed for it, pushed his way through the opening, and was immediately overwhelmed by the smell of roasting barley malt in a hazy room thick with bluish smoke. Barely a foot inside, the stone gave way to tightly placed planks of a wood floor over which was strewn an ankle-deep layer of barley. Two sweating men in nothing but braies were pushing the browning barley around with besoms.

The nearest one glared at him. “’Ere, what you doin’?”

“Deepest apologies,” he replied. “Wrong room.” He quickly went out the door and back down the steps. Studied the other path. It led downward into what looked like a narrowing tunnel, the end of which lay right under the barley chamber he’d just exited. He could make out the red coals of a low fire going there. The two together, top and bottom, had to be a malt kiln, with grain being roasted for the ale.

Cautiously, he wandered back into the main tunnel. No point in following the guards. Let them gain as much distance as possible.

Maintaining his drunken mien, he retraced his steps past various carved-out caves including the barrel cellar, to the dim room and the Yvag doxy. He had a dagger at the ready for her.

He found the room, but the doxy was gone. He turned about. No one was following him. She could have transformed into anybody by now; he might already have passed her in the tunnels. Of course, the same was true for him. She wouldn’t have known him, either.

This time he took his bow. It was time to return to the tavern. The only trouble was, the real version of his glamoured boozy illusion had been in the tavern an hour or however long ago that had been. Two of him in the same room would present a problem. He would have to change again, and soon, because she had said she would “interrogate” his allies. Did she mean everyone in the tavern? Or just Will and Geoffrey?

Nearing the tavern room then, he stepped into a shadow, where he paused, and emerged as “Robyn Hoode” in indigo and ochre once more, from then on watching for any reaction on any face and also for the two sheriff’s soldiers hunting him. Those two had apparently gone, but other Yvags might yet be about. He’d heard the buzzing of their communication earlier. Who knew how many glamoured creatures might be in there? Still, no one seemed to take any notice of him.

Then suddenly he was grabbed from behind. He twisted free and turned, ready to strike, only to find himself confronting Will Scathelock and Geoffrey. Scathelock cocked an eyebrow at the barbed black dagger. “That looks lethal,” he commented. “You seem to have sobered right up. That girl took you in the back, I thought sure she meant to rob you of your winnings. There was something in that ale, weren’t there? I tried it, could tell it was off.”

“You passed it to me, you know, Will.”

“Er, yes, well. We didn’t know where she’d taken you, so we waited for her to come back out so we could make her tell us. But she ne’er did.”

Geoffrey said, “So we was waiting, you know, and these two Norman guards came pushing in, went straight past the barrel hoist and into the caves. Well, by then you’d been gone forever. We each grew the odd idea they were here for you. Silly notion, I suppose. So we stood up and went, too. Got lost. A lot of chambers in use today. Here’s to fair day!” He laughed. “Good thing we were proved wrong. But the doxy prob’ly got away.”

Will added, “Guards came bursting back out past us, though. Looking for somebody, they were.” He eyed Thomas with friendly suspicion, as if still unconvinced they hadn’t been hunting him.

“If they return, trust me, this time they will settle on we three. It’s back to Chandler’s Lane gaol for us. We need to speak with Elias and get our friends freed from the cells of Passelewe as soon as possible.” He glanced around the noisy, bustling tavern again. How many Yvags did this crowd conceal? He listened but caught no hint of any communication. Nevertheless, he would get them out of there. No one else was being interrogated.

The three of them set forth.


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