The Gauntlet (2 page)

They could destroy us
, she thought
blankly.
They could destroy all of us
.

Chapter Two

Another pinch interrupted Gillian’s thoughts,
this time feeling like it took a hunk of her arm along with it.
“Stop daydreaming,” she was told tetchily. “And do as you’re
told!”

It wasn’t a request, and obedience to the
elders was ingrained from birth. The requisite spell all but leaped
to her lips. But the iron was corroded, or perhaps her power was
fading, because it took a second application before the old hinges
finally gave way. And by then, reinforcements had arrived.

Gillian could hear them in the corridor,
being hit with spells from the few witches still capable of
throwing any. Someone screamed and a body crashed into the heavy
wooden door, slamming it shut and momentarily interrupting the
attack. But it would be a moment’s reprieve at best. And when the
guards broke through, she didn’t think recapture would be their
main concern.

The Great Mother latched onto her arm with a
strength she hadn’t thought the woman had. “There.” She pointed to
a corner of the room that had emptied of prisoners. A splash of
sunshine, mid-afternoon and richly golden, highlighted a patch of
bare worn boards. They were old and slimy, scattered with rat bones
and smeared with human waste. But unlike the roof, they were
solid.

“I can’t,” Gillian confessed. She knew
without trying that she didn’t have the strength to destroy the
floorboards. They were good English oak, as hard as the stones that
made up the tower’s walls, and just as immovable. “We have to find
another—”

“Stop arguing,” the eldest snapped, cutting
her off. “And take me.”

Gillian took her. She didn’t know what else
to do. They were trapped.

Even worse, the vampire was standing off to
the side, casually observing the chaos. She scowled; she should
have known that sunlight wouldn’t kill him. If he was that weak,
he’d have come at night. He’d retreated further into the hood of
his cape, leaving him a long column of black wool, but otherwise
appeared unconcerned.

He didn’t move, but Gillian carefully kept
the sunlight between them nonetheless. She pulled Elinor and the
eldest along the wall, hoping the glistening beams would provide
some kind of protection. His head turned, keeping them in view, but
he said nothing.

“In the middle. There!” the Great Mother
gasped, and again Gillian followed orders, only to have her arm
gripped in a steel-like vise. Cloudy blue eyes met hers, almost
sightless, but somehow penetrating all the same. “In times like
these, we do what is needful--what we must to survive, for us and
our folk. Do you understand, girl?”

No, Gillian thought frantically. What she
understood was that the door was about to open and they were all
going to die. That was pretty damn clear. “I do not think they mean
for any of us to survive,” she said, her throat raw.

The Great Mother’s grip became positively
painful, arthritic fingers digging into the flesh of Gillian’s arm.
“It matters not what they mean! Will you
fight
, girl, for
what is yours?”

“Yes,” she said, confused. What did she
think? That Gillian planned to simply lie down and die? “But it is
not likely to be a long one. I have little power left, and the
Circle--”

“You will find that you have all the power
you need.”

Gillian didn’t understand what she meant, and
there was no time to ask. The door burst open, but she barely
noticed, because the frail body on the dirty boards had begun to
glow. Power radiated outward, shimmering beneath translucent skin
like sunlight through moth wings. It flooded the ugly room, gilding
the old bricks and causing even the guards to shield their
eyes.

Elinor made a soft sound and hid her face,
but Gillian couldn’t seem to look away. For one brief moment, the
Old Mother looked like an exquisitely delicate statue, a fire-lit
radiance flowing under the pale crepe of her skin. And then
Gillian’s own skin began to heat, the flesh of her arm reddening
and then burning where the thin fingers gripped her.

She cried out and tried to jerk away, but the
Old Mother stubbornly held on. Her skin was shining through
Gillian’s hand now, so bright that the edges of her flesh were
limned with it. But she couldn’t feel her anymore. She couldn’t
feel anything but the great and terrible power gathering in the
air, power that whispered to her, wordless and uncontrollable.

It exploded the next moment in flash of
brilliant fire. Gillian threw her body over Elinor’s, trying to
shield her from the searing heat and deadly flames she expected.
But they didn’t come. And when she dared to look again, the old
woman’s body was gone—and so was half the floor.

The thick oak boards had dissolved, crumbling
into nothingness like charred firewood, leaving a burnt, smoking
hole looking down into the room below. Gillian crouched beside it
for a moment, her heart pounding, knife-edged colors tearing at her
vision. Until a glance showed that the guards had fled in fear of
magic they didn’t understand.

She didn’t, either, but she recognized an
opportunity when she saw one.

Elinor was clinging to her neck, hard enough
to strangle. It was far from comfortable, but at least it meant she
didn’t have to try to hold her as she lowered them onto one of the
remaining rafters of the room below. It was the gatehouse, where a
contingent of mages usually stayed to watch the front of the castle
and to guard any prisoners in the room above. No one was there now,
everyone having run up the stairs to secure the door or having
scattered after the escapees.

For a brief moment, they were alone.

Gillian’s arm throbbed under the burnt edges
of her sleeve, but she ignored it and started making her way along
the beam to clear the pile of smoking shards below. Yellow sunlight
struggled through the haze, enough to let her see stone walls
spotted in a few places by narrow, arrow slit windows, a few stools
and a flat-topped storage trunk that was being used as a table. The
remains of someone’s lunch was still spread out over the top.

There were no obvious ways out. The only door
let out onto the ramparts, which were heavily guarded. And even if
they had been able to fit through the tiny windows, the main gate
was protected by two towers filled with archers. Anyone trying to
leave that way would have to traverse a quarter mile of open
fields, the local forest having been cut back to give the archers a
clear shot.

Gillian thought that she could just about
manage a weak shield, but not to cover two, and not to last the
whole way. And Elinor couldn’t help or even protect herself; she
was barely seven and her magic had yet to manifest. The eldest
should have saved her sacrifice, she thought grimly. They weren’t
going to get out of this.

“Could I be of assistance, at all?”

Her head whipped up to see the vampire’s
curly mop poking through the charred edges of the hole. She threw
up a shield, silently cursing him for forcing her to use the power,
and jumped to the floor. Shards of wood and a few old iron nails
dug into her bare feet, but the pain was almost welcome. It helped
to push away the gut-wrenching panic and let her think.

A guard was sprawled on the floor nearby,
half hidden by the fall of wood and debris. He wasn’t moving, and
one hand was a bloody mess—he must have used it to try to shield
himself. The other gripped a long piece of wood that was partially
concealed by his body. She crouched beside him and started tugging
on it, while keeping a wary eye on the creature above.

“My earlier jest may have been…ill-timed,”
the vampire offered. “I do not, in fact, intend to dine upon you.
Or your lovely…daughter, is it?”

Gillian’s head jerked up. “Touch her and they
will never find all the pieces,” she snarled, pulling Elinor behind
her.

But the creature made no move toward them,
other than to spread his hands, showing that he held no weapons. As
if he needed any. “I assure you, I pose no threat.”

“A harmless vampire.” She didn’t bother to
keep the mockery out of her voice.

“To you.” A smile came easily to that
handsome face. “In fact, I work with a party in government charged
with maintaining the security of these lands.”

“You lie. Vampires work for their
makers.”

“Yes, but in this case, my mistresses’
interests align.”

“And what would those interests be?” Gillian
asked, not because she cared, but to buy her time to find out if
the item in the guard’s hand was what she thought it was.

“The queen’s enemies are not composed of
humans alone,” he told her, as easily as if he carried on
conversations upside down every day. Which maybe he did, she
thought darkly, images of bats and other unsavory creatures coming
to mind. “Ever since England became a refuge for the Silver Circle,
she has been a target for the dark. And the assassination attempts
grow with each passing day.”

“And why should a vampire care about such
things?”

“We must live in this world, too,
Mistress--”

“Urswick,” she panted. Curse it—the guard
weighed a ton!

“I am pleased to make your acquaintance,
Mistress Urswick,” he said wryly. “I am Chris Marlowe, although my
friends call me Kit.”

“You have friends?”

“Strangely enough, yes. I would like to
number you among them, if I could.”

Gillian was sure he would. But while she
might be a penniless thief, her coven ruined, her friends scattered
or dead, neither she nor her daughter would be feeding him this
day. “Don’t count on it,” she snarled, and jerked the slender
column of wood free.

It was a staff as she’d hoped, but not of the
Circle’s make. The surface was satiny to the touch, worn smooth as
stone from centuries of handling. The oil from all those hands had
cured it to a dark mahogany, blending the black glyphs carved along
its length into the surface. She traced one of the ridges with a
fingertip and didn’t believe it, even when a frisson of power
passed through her shields to jump along her nerves.

Her fingers began to prickle, black fury
rising in front of her eyes, as she stood there with a Druid staff
in her hands. It wasn’t enough that they were persecuted,
imprisoned, and murdered. The Circle had to steal what little of
their heritage they had been able to preserve, as well.

“At the risk of sounding discourteous, may I
point out that you are in no position to be choosy?” the vampire
said, right before the door to the room slammed open and half a
dozen guards rushed in. And then blew back out as the staff turned
the door and half the wall into rubble.

“Perhaps I spoke too soon,” he murmured, as
she pulled a white-faced Elinor through the red bite of heat and
the smell of smoke to the now missing door.

Outside, the castle’s walls hemmed them in on
all sides, gray stone against
a pewter sky. A
battle was going on to the left, with the prisoners trying to get
down the stairs. They looked to be holding their own, with one
witch’s spell sending a guard flying off the battlements into the
open courtyard. But that was about to change.

Reinforcements were already running toward
the battle from either side. And they were the Circle’s elite
corps--war mages, they called them--instead of the talentless scum
employed as jailers. The witches from most of the covens were well
trained in self-defense, but their weapons had been confiscated
when they were taken. Without them, they wouldn’t last long.

Of course, that could prove true of them as
well. A group of the Circle’s dark robed mages broke off from the
main group and started their way. And in front of them was a lethal
cloud of weapons, iron dark against the pale sky.

Gillian didn’t try to run; there was no time
and nowhere to go. Against the Circle’s harsh alchemy of steel and
iron, she called Wind, and it answered far more quickly than usual.
She was only dimly aware of a blizzard of debris behind her back
and the mages’ squawks of alarm as their weapons went tumbling back
at them.

For a long moment, the roar of her element
filled her senses in a heady rush, billowing out her tattered gown,
matting her hair and blowing into her eyes. She didn’t bother to
brush it away. It felt good. It felt like power.

But it didn’t last. Within seconds, the wind
was already dying. The staff was magnifying her strength, but she
had so little left. And when it gave out--

“My offer of assistance remains open,” the
vampire said casually. He’d jumped down from the second floor and
was leaning against the shattered wall, watching the chaos with the
mildly interested glance of someone at a bear baiting with no money
on the outcome.

“It’s well known that your kind helps no one
but themselves!”

“Which is better than attacking and
imprisoning our own, would you not say?” She didn’t see him move,
but he was suddenly beside her, the wind whipping his curls wildly
around his face.

“Why should you want to help me?” she
demanded harshly.

“Because I need yours in return.”

Despite everything, Gillian almost laughed.
He stood there in his fine clothes, smelling of spices and sporting
a jewel worth the price of a house. And she was supposed to believe
that he needed anything from the likes of her?

“’Pon my honor,” he said, seeing her
expression.

“You may as well swear on your life! Everyone
knows that vampires are selfish, base, cruel creatures who only
want one thing!”

“And everyone knows that coven witches are
weak, treacherous and easily corrupted,” he shot back. “Everyone is
often wrong.”

Gillian started to answer, but a harsh
clanging echoed across the keep, cutting her off. A small group of
witches had cleared the stairs and made a break for the gates. But
the heavy iron portcullis guarding the entrance had slammed down
before they could reach it, trapping them in the middle of a sea of
enemy mages. Her hands clenched at their desperate cries for help,
but there was nothing she could do but die with them.