PULL ME UNDER - White Witch - Thirty-Four
Penultimate!
(This is the second last email you’ll receive of PMU chapters—next week I’m sending chapters 35 and 36 together!)
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Thirty-Four
Lauren watched as Ddun combed his hair and rubbed the scented oils through, rethreading the beads before braiding and tying the ends tight with red leather cord. If it wasn’t for the chill outside their cart leaking in, it reminded her of summer, to see him glisten and comfortable in his nakedness after a good scrub. The water in the basin was filthy enough the bottom was gone and still it steamed, and she wished she was able to help him, her bandages making her useless. The show was good enough, she supposed, a small sigh as she reclined on her cushions. Her maids were out at the cookfire with Tanner and the rest. A bronze lamp gave their space a romantic cast.
It was such a simple thing, to watch him move so casually and unguarded, that gave her a small sense of peace in her chest. It felt like ages since she last had the chance to catch him like this, and she was almost grateful to be infirmed to just get away with lounging and gazing at him.
“Don’t,” she said, and gave an exaggerated pout as he reached for his tunic. “I’m enjoying myself.”
“And I’m cold.” He winked at her, pulling the tunic over his head. He smelled resinous and heady, a thick amber plume. Everything smelled stronger to her than normal, and the light coat of oil through his hair was near to distracting.
“Big baby.” She patted the blanket gently beside her and wiggled to give him space. Precious few moments of quietness, and she planned on indulging as much as she could. He sat beside her with a rub on her belly, but stayed apart. Still appearing relaxed, he watched the door of the cart’s tent, as if anticipating a hand at the edge to pull it open. There was something else. “What are you thinking about?”
“Nothing.”
“Why do you have to lie like that?”
He laughed, the deep sound from his broad chest always made her stir. “Just thinking about where we’re headed.”
“The Stone Thrones?” She sat up with him. “What about it in particular?”
“It isn’t simply that us plainsmen hate the notion of Kingship. The Dvarri crown is cursed. And at Dol Daruk, the very earth is cursed. Ghosts of ancient kings walk the rocks even in daylight, plain as you or I. Well, that’s the stories.”
“You’ve never seen it?”
“No. And I never thought I would.”
“Kingdoms surround your lands from all sides but north.”
“And we make a lot of money to allow them passage in exchange for not killing them.” He looked at her over his shoulder, eyes sparkling.
“You people just love bleeding other men dry, more ways than one, don’t you?”
“Well, their money is going fast until this is all over. By summer we’ll all be paupers. Then I might just let the Stenya come back over the river to shake coin out of them.”
“I can tell financial planning is a strong suit with you,” she nudged him. “Just get Tonnun to do it. The elder with the gold tooth. I think that’s his name. He reminds me of a loan shark.”
He went silent for a moment, flicking his fingernail. She said something wrong, something that put him back to worrying. “When Tanner made his speech at the moot… I was ready to kill him. I’m just a warrior, the highest ranking of our clan, but, still… I’ve done more planning and more… consulting and negotiating and… managing numbers and… preparing… than I ever have in my life, just since then. I’m far better at having arrows fly at my head than I am at sitting with the elders.”
“Lots of firsts for me too.”
He laughed again, rubbed his eyes. “Much more than me, I’d wager.”
She adjusted herself to face him, lifting her chin with a huff of disapproval. “I see, I know why you’re moody. Don’t you dare sell yourself short, you hear me?” She stood over him with an exaggerated puffed chest, hands in painful fists on her hips. “Here is Ddun of the Black Eagle banner, killer of Stenya and curse of the—everyone who isn’t him,” she mocked a masculine voice, “the most notorious living Dvarri. Kills four men at once with only two fists. Shits stone, drinks blood. Eight feet tall. Fucks the most beautiful, doting and loving witch whenever, and wherever he pleases. And yet he doubts himself!”
“Doting and loving?”
“Shut up, I’m not done yet! Ahem.” She returned to her fake manly tone with a cough to clear her throat, and he was grinning. “He crumbles castles to dust just by looking at them—”
“Cursed castles, don’t forget they’re cursed.”
“He crumbles terribly cursed castles, lesser men piss themselves at the merest thought of such terrors! Slayer of giants, merciless killer of beasts! Insatiable pervert!”
His hand shot up under her caftan to squeeze her bum, then her hip. “Insatiable pervert is definitely one I am proud to live up to.” She giggled at him, glad she was able to keep him from brooding—if only for a moment. He kissed a trail below her navel, and she felt a blast of cold at her back when her maid pulled the felt opening to announce it was time to eat. Ddun grunted his displeasure. “I really should marry them off.”
“Then you’ll be the one to poultice my hands and cook for me?”
“I’ll get one of the men to do it.”
“Uh-huh, and I’ll let you do that, you think?”
He pulled her down onto his lap and she let out a squeal. “Do you forget I don’t have to care if you let me?”
“Here is Ddun of the Black Eagle banner, being an asshole around a witch!”
He laughed grandly then, and her heart beamed radiance through her tip to toe. “Lets eat.”
***
It seemed as if Tanner, his shell, was withering. He looked lacklustre, where before he was almost inquisitive. It made Ddun even more uncomfortable, and he wasn’t sure if it was possible for his discomfort to get worse. As if they dragged around a corpse. They had even brought a balaik for him, but his fingers barely felt the strings to grip the neck of it, the only thing that engaged him was the fire.
Haun didn’t take his eyes off him, a brooding look cloaked under the fur brim of his cap. Ddun in turn kept his eyes on Haun, watching the man twirl a bone knife in his fingers, barely poking out from his coat sleeve, but enough of a movement that it caught Ddun’s attention. The other brothers sat apart, the five of them talking amongst themselves. Did they know that Haun had taken their sister to the castle? Did he know the truth of it himself, why they went in secret?
Lauren had to leave Ddun’s side with one of her maids, the other was off to serve the soldiers so Ddun’s attention went back to Haun, who had shifted how he sat just slightly, still fiddling with the bone knife, red-cheeked in suppressed fury.
“You watch yourself with that,” Ddun warned. “Might prick yourself.”
Haun looked at him, lifted his chin—same green eyes that Irynna had. He said nothing, but his hand slid the knife back up the sleeve in one slick motion, and Ddun returned to his bowl of stew.
Lauren sat heavily hext to Ddun. “God, it feels like I have to piss every ten minutes.”
Haun stood from the fire and sauntered to his brothers, they parted for him and he sat, eyes still on Tanner as he engaged in conversation. There was that bone knife again, maybe the man thought Ddun couldn’t see. Ddun toyed with the idea of letting the man have his way. End the charade. Put Tanner’s shadow out of his misery like a lame animal.
While his mind was on that, he kept his outward good humour with Lauren. “Get used to it, I plan on keeping you pregnant until I have an incredible brood of children.”
“You’re so romantic.”
He ought to just do it himself. Lauren would have to be distracted. Tanner’s eyes reflected the flames, his hair blew softly in the wind, but he was otherwise still.
A rumble in the distance, like a thunderstorm approaching. Everyone took pause to listen, including Tanner, and Ddun’s blood went cold at the sight. What was Tanner’s interest in the sound?
Lauren noticed it too. She went to Tanner’s side to ask him what it was, but again he was silent. He turned back to the fire, expression unchanged. Ddun decided he would wait before dispatching him. If the sound was anything significant, it might be better to keep Tanner—or whatever it was, so eerily similar—around.
Ddun finished the stew and went to the brothers, taking a seat next to Haun and leaning into his ear. “Let’s wait and see what the noise is. When I’ve decided it’s time, I’ll take Lauren aside for you to take care of it. Not before then. Understood?”
Haun nodded, lips tight.
***
The rumbling came again in the middle of the night, closer now and shaking the very ground. Roused from sleep, the clanking of metal against itself as they fished their weapons. Ddun was only half dressed and had his head outside the cart, looking over the dark horizon for signs of anything unusual.
“I feel it,” Lauren whispered, “there was a portal made. Something is traveling through.”
“To us?”
“I don’t know. But the ground shouldn’t be shaking—”
He took her and pushed her down into the bedding. “Stay in here. I mean it, now.”
She nodded, lip trembling.
“I mean it!”
“I know,” she nodded again, with nervous vigour. “I won’t try anything, I’ll stay put. I promise. I love you.”
She hadn’t ever said it before, it dawned on him as he hastily strapped on his belt, sabre sheath and mask clacking against each other at his hip, shoved his feet into his boots. He pulled the sabre from the sheath and felt the cold from outside hit his skin as a gust of wind snapped open the flap to the cart, fluttering the fabric of his pants against his legs and drying his sweat on his back.
“And I love you, Lauren, more than anything.”
Looking out into the dark, his free hand flexed in and out of a fist. The embers of the cookfires were the only lights, but there was something unseen, and it rumbled. He went back to where Lauren was left sitting, the air iridescent and luminous in a haze around her, a mesmerizing pattern like twisting ribbons of smoke and light. He kissed her, breath caught at the force of the magic seeping from her, that startling fire all through him, like every part was fiercely alive and overflowing with the energy of the stars. From his skull to his toes in a wave, his bones, muscles, skin, all of him, an incredible rush of magic coursing through in pulsing beams of light and heat. When he parted from her, looking down at her in an intoxicated haze, he knew he would be killing for her before long, and he was exhilarated at the thought. It felt as if he soared from the tent, ready to meet whatever was shaking the earth as it approached.
His men all stood ready, facing the direction that the thunderous noise had boomed from. Even the moon was hidden that night, and they faced into the thick black with heaving breaths. He prayed the men he brought with him would be enough. “To the horses,” Ddun commanded as the vibration of the earth returned stronger.
He flew onto the back of his horse like he was made of feathers. Red lights in the distance as he spun to face the sounds—pairs of eyes, but he didn’t take the time to count them. He lead the men towards the sight.
Haun was behind him, a torch in one hand to light the flow of grotesques like rats beneath the horses, and Ddun halted. They reached, cackling and hissing—answered by his sabre cleaving them through, they fell in twain as he roared with the rush of spilled blood. They swarmed, clawing and biting—Haun had to throw the torch to use his bow. He was damn fast, but soon overwhelmed—with a crackling scream he was pulled from the saddle, tufts of his clothing strewn as the things tore at him, then flesh as his final screams echoed across the pitch-dark landscape. Ddun could only focus at the ones beneath himself, the thick leather and felt lining of his boots already shredded by their claws.
The red lights came closer, and he saw they were beasts. No, he thought as he focused on a nearby pair. The beast in the menagerie—the horse. The red lights were the eyes of a dozen of those horses, their huffed breaths lit red from the glow of their eyes.
Distracted by the howls of his men and the creatures at him, it gave time for the gap to close between himself, and the riders.
Once Ddun hacked a last devil away, he noticed bootleather near his head reflect the fading torchlight and Ddun’s eyes trailed upwards. Human knees, human form. As he recognized the rider, he froze, nearly dropping his sword to see Tanner sitting in the saddle with a look in his eyes like he didn’t recognise Ddun at all.
Such blue they gleamed bright and eerie, the torchlight barely able to compete as it reflected in them. Tanner’s pupils were like pinpricks, as if the sun itself blinded him, yet full of scorn. All his scars were there, his hair cut short. He rode past Ddun with only that cold stare to acknowledge Ddun was there at all.
“Tanner!” he called once he could find his voice.
No sign Tanner acknowledged him, and so Ddun turned his horse around and charged past to intercept the man who might very well be the real Tanner.
All Tanner did was flex his hand, and Ddun’s horse jutted up into a tall spike—Ddun slid and fell flat on his back. The pain was slight, he attributed it to the magic in his blood, and he was able to quickly right himself to grab the reins of the beast as it passed. The look Tanner sent down chilled him even through the haze of magic, those intense, absent eyes, finally giving some awareness—and he swung a fist down into Ddun’s temple.
As Ddun tipped backwards, though he felt little pain, Lauren's screams from the cart were muffled like his head was stuffed with gauze. He never new Tanner to have such strength.
The other riders passed him now, as he regained his footing. He picked his sabre from the snow, and he saw that they weren’t men at all. Skeletons, armoured heavy, but no eyes to see nor flesh to cut. Ddun’s soldiers, from somewhere, were shooting arrows at the riders—he found his feet to run to the camp, where more torches had been lit and lamps hung in a sorry attempt to light the deep night. Tanner’s shadow stood near the dead cookfire, empty-faced and unafraid, but before Ddun could reach him the Tanner on the beast-horse took a sabre from it’s sheath and struck his shadow with a blow that cleaved it from shoulder to navel. It was the sight that followed that really halted Ddun in his tracks, his hand gripping the hilt even tighter—white sand, streaming endlessly from the wound, emptying the body that looked like Tanner until his skin fell flat into the ground and crumbled like old parchment in the wind.
“Go! Run! Head back to the camp at Kisku, any man still standing!” Ddun shouted into the night. “Go!” If they were too stubborn, and chose to stay and fight, they’d be dead by morning. There was no vengeance to be had for Irynna’s brothers, not now.
Lauren shouted at her brother to stop, and Ddun still had the little fucking gremlins to contend with, a second wave of them and no horse underneath as a buffer. His sabre was drinking it’s fill of their blood, swing after swing, and they kept coming. He almost missed Tanner dismounting to poke his boot into the sand, pushing the pile around as if looking for something. When it wasn’t found, he turned to Lauren in the cart.
She stopped calling for him then, looking around to the other riders, looking at Ddun, but the intensity of the blood rushing in his ears he couldn’t understand what she was saying when she tried to speak to her brother. Even magicked, he was beginning to tire. If he fell, the swarm would tear him apart. If he didn’t run, he would fall. He kicked one hard, sending it skidding along the ground and ran to the cart.
Tanner grabbed his sister by the wrist and pulled her down, while she screamed for him to stop. No, it couldn’t be real. Tanner would never—
“Get on the horse,” Tanner told her. It was his voice.
“Let her go or I’ll be forced to kill you.” Even as Ddun threatened he could hear the gibbering creatures behind him, gnashing teeth as if taunting him to turn around and fight them again. The other riders simply sat and watched, if indeed they could see.
Tanner turned back to Ddun, his scars seemed to radiate hate. “Kill me, and you’d be killing a King.” He tossed Lauren’s arm from him, and she stumbled backwards, but for the moment she was alright, if terrified. Ddun could still feel the threads of magic holding him together, burning in his bones.
“So be it.” He swung his sabre around his head in a fierce strike, and Tanner swatted it aside with skill Ddun didn’t know him to possess. The force of Tanner’s parry sending waves up his arm as if he had been punched by a stone. They circled each other, striking at any opening, dodging and parrying, blocking with deafening rings of metal. He didn’t want to hurt Tanner, his friend—knowing this was no shell, no shadow—but Tanner seemed to have no qualms at all about hurting Ddun. It was as if Tanner didn’t see him at all, Ddun was a stranger, a nuisance.
Finally, Ddun nicked him. His sabre sliced Tanner’s hand, a clean cut just above the black leather of a bracer. Superficial, but it was blood that dropped to the earth, not sand. Ddun swallowed, the confirmation that it was truly Tanner—but he couldn’t stop what they had started. Tanner was relentless, teeth bared as he slammed into Ddun again and again. Each strike startled Ddun more than the last. Was Tanner magicked? By who?
“Is it Meired I’m fighting, or Tanner MacGillivray?”
At the question, there was a strange waver in Tanner’s eyes, a pause long enough for Lauren’s maids to leap onto his back from the dark and try to pull him down, biting him and clawing with their fierce little hands. He tried to throw them off with only slightly more luck as Haun had with the devils at his feet. Lauren was—to Ddun’s shielded amusement—cheering them on, encouraging the girls to get him to the ground. In the chaos of the scene Ddun nearly forgot he was supposed to be the one fighting Tanner, and while they pulled him backwards Ddun took Tanner by the collar of his tunic and walloped him twice across the face with the hilt of his sabre. Tanner’s eyes crossed, but he remained standing, even while blood was shed from his nose. Ddun would have to apologize to the maids, and try to remember their names. No wonder they survived the raid on their village.
The riders behind them finally stirred, blades unsheathed in unison and the horses all huffing as they began another walk towards them. “Kill me,” Tanner growled as he finally flung one of the girls from his back, “and you won’t survive either. I came for the witch.” The other was shrugged off soon after.
“This witch is your sister!” Lauren was beyond tears, her body shaking with rage.
Tanner ignored her, swinging the sabre over his head to strike at Ddun once more, and Ddun dodged it. Tanner’s strikes were getting wild now, his steps less sure.
But those little ratty bastards soon were back at Ddun’s heels, and he couldn’t fend off everything at once. If Lauren hadn’t summoned the glass from tears in the air, he would have been dead from the next blow Tanner swung at him. A shard of glass knocked the blade from Tanner’s hand with a soft thud into the snow. They rained down on the riders with terrible cracks against their armour and bones, the ear-bleeding smash of the spikes nearly deafening in the night.
“I’m through with this,” Tanner said, and with a ball of a fist a portal appeared behind Lauren, and he ran from Ddun to push her through. Ddun tackled Tanner from behind and the three of them went through before the portal blinked from existence.