Count On Me Read online

  Finally he almost throws it onto the stone table and turns, panting, to sit before it.

  Conrad watches the gauntlet on his left hand soften, rotting like old spider webs, drifting on the air like smoky motes as it falls away from his skin. As he sits back he sloughs off the ancient power, and its retreat leaves him cold.

  A quick glance over his shoulder, and he shudders. Sometimes he doesn’t know if he only feels the blade’s vicious hunger, or shares in it.

  His hands flex. Even when he breaks his grip on it, it never relaxes the one that crushes him. Tonight’s ride is a jumble of haunted imagery: the flash of red in the dark, the vicious inner light as the thing in the steel exults in feeling, the terrible shudder of impact as blade meets metal and wood and finally flesh, the shock running up his shoulders.

  He winces in memory, fighting down the rising gorge from his empty stomach. It burns like acid in this throat and he pinches his nose, shivering.

  “When will this end?” he groans.

  “Father?”

  He looks up. Saska pads softly into the courtyard, arms folded across her chest.

  Conrad blinks and scowls. She wears a simple gown and a heavy cloak against the chill. The dark renders her pale face and hands ghostly, aglow like the tree behind him.

  “What are you doing here?” he growls. “You know my law. No one is to step outside on a night with no moon.”

  “I had a strange dream and woke in the night. I heard you return.”

  Conrad blinks a few times.

  No, that’s not right. She was with him when he rode the high road back to the castle, and she was dressed strangely. He remembers.

  “You were here?”

  “Always.”

  “Leave me,” he commands, waving his hand. “I’ve no time for you.”

  “No time for the bastard,” she says coldly.

  “It’s not safe. Go back inside.”

  He looks up and she stands before him, looking over him hungrily at the blade on the table.

  “What do you want?” he demands.

  “I want to leave,” she says, “but I can’t leave. None of us can.”

  “I know,” he says bitterly. “Get out.”

  His bastard daughter draws her hood to hide within its shadow and departs, gliding silently on slippered feet. Conrad plunges his head in his hands and fights the pain he feels, like hot hooks pulled through his veins.

  Leaning on the stone table, he rises to his feet.

  “I fed you. Leave me alone.”

  A soft rattle of steel against wood rises from the stone. Placing his hand on the grip, he holds it down as if it might escape and slides the scabbard halfway free. Again he watches his reflection fade into the red dark, and gazes deep.

  The woman trudges up the road, leaning into her strides, her face a mask of mute concentration, broken only when she hears some hint of danger in the dark. A rustle of grass, a breaking twig. One look at her face and a rush of pleasant warmth spreads through his body. She is more than beautiful.

  Under his hands, the steel seems to squirm, as if it cannot abide hope.

  He rests both palms upon it, feeling.

  There is no sword, no table, and no tree. He is behind her, watching. He feels the earth turn beneath him. He feels those who tread upon it, the roots that grip it, and the wind that whispers between the leaves.

  She turns, scanning the world around her, eyes fearful but resolute, sharp in the dark. Her eyes catch the light the way they always did, halfway between green and gold and full of insight beyond her years.

  Finally she looks toward him but sees nothing. He is far away, shrouded in walls of despair on a mountain of sorrows. He only watches.

  “Hello?” she says, almost seeing, grasping for something in the dark. “Is anyone there?”

  A response rises in his throat, but she can’t hear him. It passes his lips but echoes in the dark before a dead tree, out of her hearing.

  “Turn back,” he begs, “turn back before the sun rises. Leave this place.”

  He looks upon her face from only inches away. The chill night breeze kisses her hair, caresses her skin until her pretty cheeks turn bright pink from the cold. She shivers every time he breathes, and hugs her arms around herself.

  The pain in his chest is like a claw crushing his heart. Hold her. Feel her warmth. Protect her.

  He almost laughs. As if she’s the one who needs the protecting.

  Then he feels it. A flicker, like a spark wreathing her body. She blinks, not with the eyes of her body but with the eye of her mind, one that sees but cannot be seen. He watches her shudder with recognition.

  She takes a halting half step forward and then walks, passing through him. Her body shivers against his as their spirits touch, and then he jerks back. The smell of burned meat rises from his palms as he topples from the stone table.

  It will heal by morning. He doesn’t feel the pain. Elation floods his chest, like a deep draught of godly nectar. Nor does he feel his head thump against the wall when he slumps against it.

  The sword quivers on the stone table, shaking with pain or fury. The scabbard slides itself home.

  Something breaks and Conrad takes his first full breath of the night without it gripping his chest, crushing the air from his lungs. It no longer tastes the night with him, walks with him, sees with him. It denies him angrily, as a spurned lover might.

  Rising, he turns from it and drags the gates shut. The vile thing needs no guarding. He doesn’t bar the way to keep others out; he bars it to keep that thing locked in.

  Every step is heavy with memory, old sorrows caught between the stones like mortar.

  Halfway to his chambers he falls to sit on the winding stone stair. It is not coincidence. He’s sat here before, many and many times, alone often enough but more often not. Every inch of this place is brimming with ghosts.

  It’s starting again. A spider scuttles across the step, a fat, dark thing with too many legs. He crushes it with the heel of his boot, and grinds for good measure. How he hates them, but it seems for every one he crushes underfoot a dozen more spring up to plague him.

  “I’ll save her this time,” he promises the empty air, but the words are hollow, and so very, very tired.

  3

  The Castle

  Roxanne

  I stood at the road for ten minutes before I said, out loud, and to no one in particular, “Alright, pick one.”

  I picked left and I’m sticking to it. That takes me toward the mountains, but the alternative is to walk toward nothing at all, and something is better than nothing. Hopefully I’m not just delirious and losing my mind, but I feel like I am making progress.

  Walk, walk, walk, and walk some more. One foot then the other, left then right, and there it is.

  I find myself approaching a broken stone arch, its two halves reaching but never to meet above the road. On the other side of the wall, I find bare earth and trellises, and scratching picker vines gripping the old silvery wood. They stretch off in either direction, along with the wall. It stretches off so far I can’t even see where it begins to curve.

  Elation surges through me. It’s midday and I’ve been walking since not long past dawn. I pick up my pace. The road is not so rutted here and much wider, more comfortable to walk. I crest a hill and stop.

  I am so glad the sun is up. This place is creepy at night. I never stopped feeling like someone, or something, was watching me. I swear one time it got so close it felt like it was touching me.

  Ahead of me there’s a village. A real village. A place. People. Men and women move about in fields of wheat, threshing it by hand. Far off, waddling oxen pull carts piled mountainously high with straw. The world smells of turned earth and sweat and I am at long last surrounded by other human beings again. I almost fall to my knees with my joy but instead walk faster, nearly stumbling.

  The village is good sized. There must be fifty small mud daub houses clustered around a big, two-story house
with plaster walls and a tile roof. The others are straw. Thatched, that’s called thatching. Oh my God, this place. It looks like I walked onto the set of a fantasy movie.

  I slow as I approach. No one pays me much mind, until the dirt road turns to cobbles, so old and smooth that they must have been here forever. What is this place?

  Finally I get some attention as I walk into town. A man looks up from hammering a red-hot piece of metal but says nothing. A woman walks past me with a huge bundle of grain under her arm but doesn’t speak to me.

  My sleep-deprived, terror-addled, plane-crash rattled mind wonders if this is real at all. What if they’re ghosts? I laugh at myself.

  Then they come riding up. My throat clenches when I see two men approaching me on horses. I stop in the street and let out a breath when they pull up on their reins and bring their animals to a stop.

  They shout at me.

  Oh.

  Well, shit.

  I blurt out a reply in every language I know, or have an even a few words of.

  “Hello. Buongiorno. Bonsoir. ’Allo.”

  The lead rider switches to German.

  “State your business here.”

  “My plane crashed and some people with red scarves tried to kill us and a big guy on a horse killed them. Please, for the love of God, help me.”

  They look at me blankly then stop to confer with each other.

  After swinging down from his mount and handing the reins off to his companion, the lead rider approaches me. On the ground, he’s tall and broad, dressed in rough wool and high leather boots. He carries a sword on one hip and an antique-looking pistol on the other, the Old-Westy kind with a spinny thing in the middle.

  A revolver, that’s what they call those. Because it revolves. I giggle stupidly to myself.

  Oh God, I’m losing my mind.

  He stops up short, looking down at me over the most impressive mustache I’ve ever seen. This thing is downright massive, all gray and drooping past his chin on either side. Long sideburns, too. He looks at the other rider and shrugs.

  They continue speaking German for my benefit.

  “We should let the count decide what to do with her.”

  Do with me?

  Gulp.

  “Find some mount for her.”

  By the time they bring out a mule for me to ride, I’m surrounded by people. Villagers. The live in a village, I’m calling them villagers, even if I feel both a little silly and a little bad about it. I wonder what the place is called.

  The women in particular seem awed by me. They keep looking at my legs. It takes me a minute to realize why. I’m wearing jeans and they’re all in wool dresses with smocks and aprons, some of burlap, some wool, some leather, probably depending on what they do all day. The men appear fascinated by my calves. A few of the younger ones look right at my butt, and it starts to make me a little uncomfortable.

  “Here,” the big man says.

  He gives me a boost up onto the back of the mule. She, or he, or whatever, doesn’t react to my presence. I can’t remember if all mules are girls or all mules are boys. Without any prompting from me, the animal starts walking.

  The only structure with two floors is a huge, plaster-walled house that looks vaguely like a chalet. I think that’s the right word. The tile roof is cracked and missing pieces here and there. A short, squat bell tower rises from the top.

  The two men look up. My gaze follows theirs, and I see it. Our destination.

  The road winds up, taking a sharp switchback route to more easily ascend the mountain slopes, as they rise more steeply with every foot. The road comes to a thickly built gatehouse, built of the same black rock as the castle behind it.

  It’s like it folds out of the fog, gripping the mountains. The short hairs on the back of my neck rise as I look up at the castle. It bites into the rock, clinging to a natural table, and from this distance, it must be absolutely enormous. A low wall stretched between squat towers curtains a second wall, much taller, held up by five round towers, the tallest in the middle.

  It gives me a feeling of vertigo just to look at it. The twisty sensation in my head grows deeper, into something like recognition. Was this place in the field guide I was reading? Have I seen it on TV? Was there a movie made here?

  It’s a long way up. By the time we are near the top, the castle itself juts straight up, leaning forward just a bit, as if I am a bug and it’s thinking about smashing me.

  The gatehouse I saw is on one end of a narrow ravine, the castle on the other. The walls meet the rock face, a sheer drop to a stream far below. No one could survive that fall and the gap is too wide to jump, even if there was something to jump to besides sheer rock and walls. A broad wooden bridge, banded with iron, connects the gatehouse to the castle proper and crosses the gap.

  Drawbridge. That’s a drawbridge. Castle. I’m going into a castle. The two riders hail someone in the gatehouse with a nod. As the gates open, I begin to realize how much it looks like a skull.

  An iron grate inside enhances the effect. I duck instinctively beneath a set of sharp iron spikes even though they’re well overhead. The hooves of my mule thump on the wood as we cross, and I chance to look over the edge.

  That was a mistake. It’s like someone took a giant axe and gouged out a twenty-foot-wide cut in the mountainside. There’d be no hope of a soft landing or sliding along slopes. It’s straight down. Fall, scream, splat.

  I sit up and let the mule carry me over with my eyes closed.

  Once I’m inside I dismount.

  I try to, anyway. I make it about halfway down then fall right on my ass into the dirt of a wide, deep courtyard bustling with people. The two guards take a knee, one leg down, one knee up, arm resting on it, eyes on the dirt.

  So does everyone else in the courtyard except for one man.

  My breath catches as the most beautiful man I have ever seen approaches me on long legs. Dressed in plain black wool, he cuts a magnificent figure, with his broad chest, powerful arms, and a swaggering gait. My heartbeat quickens, thumping against the inner wall of my chest, and my mouth falls open.

  His square jaw is clean shaven, his handsome face unlined but still bearing some subtle hint of age. He could be thirty or fifty, I’d believe either, but there is no doubt that he is so handsome it’s like a hand squeezing my heart. I stare at him openly, the only person daring to look right at him. Straight, silky blond hair gathers behind his head into a ponytail that sways loosely almost down to his waist.

  I swallow. “Uh, hi.”

  He replies in German. “What are you doing here?”

  I lick my lips, still staring at him. He has very strong hands, beautiful hands, powerful yet delicate fingers. I have a sudden desire to feel them wrap around mine, tiny by comparison.

  Oh. I was supposed to answer him.

  “I… My plane crashed. I was with my friend…um…fellow survivor… We walked for a long time and it was dark, and we saw stuff, and there were these stones, and a guy on a horse with antlers…”

  “Stop,” he says sharply.

  I stand up, rising shakily to my feet, and brush the dust off my knees. Halfway up he steps in and takes my arms, drawing me fully to my feet. My throat goes dry when I feel his touch. His hands are full of power, and so big he can wrap his fingers all the way around my arms easily.

  No one else has stood up yet.

  Glancing to one side then the other, I shrug.

  “I’m Roxanne,” I say.

  I stick out my hand and offer him a shake.

  He hesitates. Then he takes it. He holds my fingers in his soft, warm grasp, gentle even though his skin is rough. He leans down, and he brushes my knuckles with his lips.

  My heart tries to pound out of my chest and I stare at him, openmouthed. My legs don’t want to work anymore.

  “I have the honor of being Conrad, Count von Grauberg. Welcome to my castle and my home.”

  I giggle. Then bite down on it and stifle the stupid noise b
ubbling out of my throat.

  “I really need your help. I… I don’t have anywhere to go.”

  “If you would follow me,” he says, making a motion with his hand.

  I blink before I realize it wasn’t for me. Everyone else rises to their feet.

  Activity resumes. A hammer bang-bangs on steel, men and women circulating, doing…stuff. Castle things. I’m in a castle. My head swims as we cross the broad courtyard.

  This place is like two castles, one built around the other. The big inner towers loom over all, the high wall stretched between them smooth and unbroken black stone, like they were carved rather than built.

  Buildings push up against those inner walls. The biggest is itself a small fort, with two towers of its own. A broad gate leads inside, and the count guides me in.

  Count.

  Don’t even think it, Roxanne. If he was a vampire he couldn’t come out in daylight, right?

  Besides, even movie vampires aren’t so…gorgeous. I keep looking at him as I walk beside him. Looking up. I’m not short, but he’s very tall.

  He’s not sparkling. That’s a good sign, right?

  “Is there something wrong?” he asks me.

  “Nothing,” I say.

  Besides me staring like an idiot, anyway. At least I wasn’t grinning.

  I’ve never had much luck with men. By much, I mean really any. A few boyfriends, a few fumbling explorations, but things went sour fast.

  Nose to the grindstone workaholic, that’s me. Ready to graduate a semester early and get the hell out of New Jersey.

  Well, I did one of those.

  Now I’m in here.

  The gates open onto a wide hallway. I mean, wide as a street wide. The walls are lined with tall tapestries, scenes of battle and conflict. I shudder a little when I spot the woven figure of a man in an antlered helmet.

  “Who is that?” I ask, stopping to point.

  “Some knight or other. This way.”

  He motions me forward. I follow, to the end of the corridor where large oak doors stand open to a large space. Tall windows let in the sun, throwing beams across the hall to meet where dust motes dance. At the end is a high seat, set up on a stage, or whatever you would call that. A dais?