Hidden Jewel (Heartfire Series) (28 page)

She'd felt it; the sudden opening of a door, the painful knowledge of just what had been wrong with her lover for the past two hours; Jacob's weak cry for help...

Horses were ready, waiting, dismounted mere moments before by her parents, her grandmother, each of whom turned with looks of curious expectation at the sudden entrance of a silently howling Micah and a furious Ailill.

"Do ye ready yon firepit, Father," she warned, helping Micah mount Annie's mare, her movements quick, seemingly unfeeling. "I shall be killing yon blackhearted fiend
today
!" In a single athletic leap, she was atop her own mount, hair flying out behind her in a blaze as she flew toward the forest beside Micah. James quickly remounted his beast and followed, leaving a stunned Annie in his wake.

      
He had been naked, lying on his back in a slowly spreading pool of his own blood; of vomit and other liquefied matter best forgotten. His wrists, still fettered, the skin torn, slick with warm crimson, the shattered remains of a wooden chair, his royal throne? lay scattered about the room; one jagged shard embedded through each hand had all but stopped the flow of blood; twin corks, intentionally left in place to keep him alive, tortured with pain unimaginable. Others lying nearby had been used to puncture his battered flesh over and over, carelessly discarded in his own filth; his perfect, beautiful bronze flesh, blackened by countless blows, bled freely, the ribcage beneath broken, so broken. His face was unrecognizable, beaten to a bloody mass of tissue and bone that made Ailill cringe, gulp down the insistent burn of tears. It was not the blood that overwhelmed her years of training... it was the sight of Jacob; a prince borne, stolen son of a king; one of her betrothed. It was that, alone, that set her moving, all feeling pushed far out of reach before it consumed her.  

And he'd been awake, aware, watched through one swollen, slitted eye as the door buckled, burst in on itself until it hung on a single half-melted hinge; saw Ailill standing in the afternoon sunlight, fury darkening her features, her eyes black with a rage unlike any he'd ever seen before. She'd seen the spark of recognition, the utter humiliation run through him for one very brief instant. And then he closed his eyes, fell away into blessed deliquium, too hurt to care, too broken to face his twin, knowing that Micah would be with him again soon enough; too soon. He'd wanted one last look at his twin, wanted to see the happiness of a man lucky enough to lie with Ailill. It made up for the mortification of his own soul, one dying gift for another.

She had given him more; as much of herself as she was able, altruistically taking of her enchanted self so that he would live; so that he would once again be whole beside his twin, beside himself in triplicate. It had been too much; the effort to heal the man stole her strength, every last ounce of it. For what seemed like days and days she heard the whispering, the heartfelt pleas, felt the assuring serenity of dogged vigilance and, though she wondered at it, she'd not the strength to fully awake, to open her tired eyes and see who it was there, at her side, talking, always talking, of nothing, of everything, until the mellow tones lessened into an ever huskier drawl, sometimes the soft burr of her own Gaelic, whispered with clarity into her ears, a reminder of herself.

Muttering fitfully in her dream state, Ailill slipped once again into Jacob's living nightmare, unaware that in the darkness of sleep, in the deep sleep of healing, she wept openly for the lad who had taken up permanent residence in her wounded heart.

Without hesitation, nor thought of what anyone might think, Jacob moved from the chair, so tired he could hardly stand after so many days. Moving the bedclothes aside, he eased down beside the sleeping woman, as he had a dozen times already; the eerie whispers, the breathy sound of crying in the depths of sleep no less painful now than they had been the first time; feelings tangible enough that he felt certain he could reach out, grasp them in the palm of his hand. She was cloaked in a colorful cloud, an amorphous blanket blending shade to shade, color to color with no sense of order. The emotions of her dreams shifted, the colors of the mist shifted. Purple, red, black, deepest pink. Other shades of other colors, when small bits of reality set in, remnants of the life she had known; halcyon images, memories euphoric. Each time one of those seeped into this nightmarish existence it had been preceded by a most glorious shade of silver; as it had just moments ago. He slipped easily beneath the mist, a deepening shade of gray, a black that should have been smothering in its depth; it was none so frightening with her warmth in his arms and he held on, his unblemished cheek resting above her steadily beating heart; an irregular rhythm, unique only to Ailill. When it began to speed up, to thump a rapid, resounding beat, he held tighter, afraid she might be swallowed in the darkness, forever lost in the void of his own tortuous punishment at the hands of Kiah Morna, Eldest Son of the Eldest Son.

Two inches wide, the stakes were slick with blood; it was hard to find purchase in the smooth wetness, the muscles swollen tight around an alien object; tiny bits of bone shifted each time she touched one. Micah screamed as she drew them out, his sense of pain only one of many things he shared with his twin. It was his own hands that throbbed, that were smashed to bits beneath the skin by the butt of Jacob's own rifle. He screamed and howled and wept his heartache, his twin beaten so close to death that his own life was in jeopardy. James had to bodily remove him, to carry him to the opposite side of the cabin; Ailill instantly recognized the sound as James' palm met Micah's cheek, the startling slap of flesh on flesh; her own cheek blazed, red-hot with the shared sensation. She breathed a sigh of relief at the silence that suddenly filled the room, her mouth clamped at once against the invasive odour of merciless torture, of ultimate death. Loosed muscles voiced a most humiliating last word. Naught could be done, naught but heal him and reveal everything. One look screamed that it had to be done; she'd never seen a man so brutalized, so absolutely broken; physically; mentally. Placing her hands carefully, delicately, one to the blackened brow, one to the punctured groin, she leaned over Jacob's still body, lips hovering an inch above his own battered mouth, breathing his foetid air; giving back her own healthful scent.

Oh Brid, please give me strength, it will take all that I am to heal them.

Jacob dozed fitfully, his body awaiting the words, the plea to a goddess of another time; a signal that the nightmare was peaking, whispered in his own ancestral tongue. When it came, his eyes opened, the fathomless depths black as night; his lips moved against her neck, citing a prayer as ancient as the fallow fields of Erin, the craggy slopes of Alba. He shivered, an archaic image floating unbidden behind his eyes, a circle of stones, megaliths the size of giants atop a dun, ablaze in the fire of a rising sun. Cloaked figures moved as one, swayed, back and forth through the stones, weaving an infinite triskelion, casting formless shadows upon the forbidding menhir, dark blots against the darker xenoliths. Druids, all; not one visible to the naked eye. Yet he knew that each enchanted being proved as beautiful as the next beneath the pale cloth, their forms sheer perfection, the progeny of the woman leading the fluid dance;
Ailill
. Her face was always revealed, her hair a flaming nimbus amongst the darkness, within the light. She was the earth, her children borne of an everlasting lunar union, each gracefully paying homage to the sun in a timeless age.

    
She sighed softly, sweetly, the tautness of her limbs gone slack, boneless, heavy against him as she fell away into dreams more tranquil. Watching the rise and fall of her chest slow, her eyes moving to and fro beneath the pale lids, Jacob sighed as well. He owed his life to her, his gratitude. He'd watched as she took his pain away, seen her push herself to limits so far beyond reason that it had all seemed surreal. Even as his body healed, Ailill remained; one soft hand on his brow, the other pressed to his groin through the discomfort of a growing fire in her palms, her face inches above his own, eyes reflecting the horror she tried so desperately to erase from his own memory. And then she was gone, falling away from him in a swoon of utter exhaustion, her limp body caught without injury by Micah's quick, steady hands, carried away by James, whose intense blue gaze softened when he met Jacob's sad eyes.

Thirteen days; she had not awakened once, her body recovering from invisible wounds, repairing itself in sleep. Or so Fallon had explained the seeming lack of consciousness, her pale eyes boring through the girl as if looking through an opaque window. Jacob had never seen someone sleep so long, so deeply. It was a bit frightening, until he learned how to read the aura about her, the colorful mist. The old woman had explained it away, disregarded Jacob's insistence that it was there, and declared that Ailill would sleep for days in a comatose state, her inherited abilities taxed beyond all reason. She'd said that Ailill was too weak to dream. Jacob knew differently. He'd kept vigil at her side from day one; had watched her walk through her dreams; and when she slipped closer to that state of awareness, he talked to her, told her everything, anything that came to mind, his voice a whisper beside her tiny pink ear. Anything to keep the sense of horror at bay; to quell memories of darkness so encompassing he was sure he'd die after all.

When he could get away from the frantic, search for Kiah, seemingly vanished from the face of the earth, Micah did the same, his own voice low, tinged with despair when he thought Jacob asleep. At night they slept beside her, held her through the darkest hours in strong arms, soothing  themselves; sharing Ailill without recognizing the significance of their actions. It felt as natural as breathing.

Into the Shadows

She came to slowly, eyes glittering, the rainbow hue of a thousand prisms in the dusky blue of twilight. Her body felt heavy with disuse, the muscles too flaccid for comfort; weighted down with slack bonds, too thick, too leaden to be anything but limbs, living flesh. Her fingers trailed slowly over the warm restraints, paused briefly over the pulsebeats beneath knobbed wrists, a matching rhythm in both men, as if their very lives were singular, their slow, steady breaths in unison near her ears. She wondered how long she'd slept, the moments of lucidity seemed to overlap in the mists of memory. The nightmare had worn itself out at some point, a numbness descending upon her mind, her heart, with the ghastly images, her dreams returning to the usual mix of sub-reality and ghostly beings, those folk long past who'd kept up a running dialogue through every night of her young life. It seemed they had missed her, the robed ancestors, the kilted warriors, for she felt much less rested than she would have expected. It had not been them, the ghosts of her dreams, who'd pulled her through, who'd comforted her. No, in truth, it seemed that they had wished her to stay longer in the land of Nod, and she had not resisted the familiarity of them, the sense of normalcy in those auld folks after the tormenting dreams before. But it had been different this time. Awake or not, she'd been aware of Jacob, her constant companion throughout the long days, the hours of darkness. She'd done the right thing in healing the lad, in drawing his meticulously meted hell into her own mind. He'd suffered more than his share at the hands of a maniac; both of the brothers had; it was all either had ever known. What more could she do but lessen such pain as she found buried deep inside the lad.

There was much to be said about sharing oneself, both physically and mentally. In lying with Micah, giving her sense of self completely into his own capable hands, a connection had been made. He'd unwittingly shared everything, all his memories. In healing Jacob, taking away nearly all vestiges of pain, she had taken his past as well; or very nearly so. Their minds, the memories that occasionally plagued them both, were still intact, as they should be. Ailill had basically made a sort of photocopy, drawn it into her own mind. Neither knew it, nor would she tell them... not yet. They'd not been trained, raised up to know themselves, of all they were capable. She had. Very little of herself had been given up, merely a seed planted in the fecund soil of the two men's brains. It would be a slower process; each would realize things about her without truly noticing anything amiss. That was what had taken so much out of her. Controlling her own abilities in an alien land, a war-torn land of utter disenchantment.

Oh, how I long to go home
, she silently lamented. From the dregs of memory arose images- majestic purple mountains, their snow-capped peaks winking above a blanket of shimmering mist; emerald glens shaded with darker evergreens; mossy moors dotted with varying shades of heather, the golden brilliance of gorse beneath lazuline skies; the chill North Sea, cobalt waters crested white with foam, iridescent, as dazzling as a peacock's tail where it raced along the headlands flanking the Moray Firth; a most beauteous sight, her homeland in all its glory.

Alba
.

She missed her kin most desperately; the shimmering faces of lads and lasses, eyes of every shade of gemstone known to man, so much like her own. A feeling of utter loneliness nearly made her cry out, her chest too constricted even to breathe beneath the leaden arms of the twins. She had to get away, to find solace within herself; an impossible feat, removing her weakened self from the grasp of these men who'd selflessly assumed the role they had been born to, their plight accepted ere either knew what it would be.