Aleksey's Kingdom (A Royal Affair #2)(58)

We did not need to say that dawn was now not something to be welcomed. Dawn meant sacrifice.

I tried not to think of the horror that had overtaken this place and wondered if echoes of it remained and if that was what I had sensed as we approached the falls. Can you hear a remnant of the awfulness that has come upon a place? Had I been hearing not the thunder of the water or feeling the vibrations of its great plunge off the face of the earth, but hearing and sensing echoes of the terror of the poor people who had come here to live freely and worship their God in the way they wanted without fear of repercussion?

They did not come for us that day.

We spent a good proportion of the short daylight hours searching more for Major Parkinson, but our diligence was not rewarded. There was no sign of him at all, and our hearts were burdened by misgivings over his likely fate.

By nightfall we knew what they intended to do to us, but no one spoke of it. There was only one way I liked eating Aleksey, and he felt the same about me, so they could wait as long as they liked if that was what they thought would happen. We would starve together first. Captain Rochester was another matter. But he was one to our two, so we did not fear his hunger.

And this hunger was very great on the following day. We had water—too much water, if truth be told—but nothing whatsoever to eat. Despite my best attempts to lure a bird to the ground and snare it, I could not. The cold bit into our bones and made us all ill with it.

He came before the dawn on the seventh day of our imprisonment upon the island. Seven little nicks into the trunk of a tree. John had died on the fifth day, from the cold more than his hunger, although we had taken him into our curl of body as tightly as if he had been a third lover.

Perhaps they thought Aleksey and I would assuage our hunger upon him, but we did not. We laid him out and would have covered him if we had the strength, and Aleksey said words over him. It seemed to banish some of the horror for a while.

I will admit here and now that my agonies upon the island during those seven days were not helped by thoughts of my poor horses. Boudica in foal. Xavier, my companion for so many years, and Freedom, the tangible representation to me of what Aleksey and I had achieved by leaving our world and coming to this new one. I tried not to think of what the child might be doing to them to spite himself upon me, or just for the pleasure of it, but as the hungry days in the cold wore on my mind, I dwelt upon it, and I was the more miserable for it.

Neither of us could rise when the devil finally came for us.

I could hardly believe what I was seeing, but at last the final part of the mystery revealed itself to me. I knew what he was and where he had come from, but I could do nothing with this knowledge.

I confess I was overwhelmed for a while, and in a very dark place in my mind, for we were reunited again with Major Parkinson: the devil was wearing his skin. I did not think our horror could have been increased after what we had endured in the snow those seven days, but I felt Aleksey’s heart sink and knew he was at the very end of his reserves of courage.

We were bound securely around our waists to trees, unable to resist, but we were fed. At first I could not fathom why he fed us after such a deliberate starving, but he had the woman, Mary Wright, bring us bread and wine, and she knelt and offered it, and I then realized we were now favored of this deformed god, for we were sacrifice. We had been purified, purged, and now we had to be appeased and made ready with offerings.

Aleksey laughed at her and said she prepared a table in the presence of her enemies, and I was relieved. He was not at the end at all, and his courage rallied mine.

We could see she did not even understand his allusion. I ate, and I made Aleksey eat, although he did not want to touch their food. We devoured everything there was, and I felt immediately more myself and able to think.

In some ways I wished he had left me insensible, for knowing what was to come and thinking about it as it was happening to me almost undid me.

We were dragged to the shore, and even though we resisted and were two, even the woman was stronger than either of us now. The child was with them once more, and he had a sharpened stick, which he used to poke us in the face or genitals when we resisted. I knew then that the man’s words about the woman and the child were true, for this is often the way of native children with captives.

The sun was beginning to come up but had not quite reached the shore upon which we lay. I was then strapped to a log, and the devil raised his stolen face to the sky and began to chant. It was a horrible mixture of Latin and French, his own languages, and some of the native tongues I recognized, and somehow then an older language, which I did not and was glad not to know. The sun reached the poor major’s face, began to trace its very unwelcome path down, and then it reached the sand and the water.

I will not recount what Aleksey was doing or saying, or I in reply to his words, come to that.

We had known that separation in this life was inevitable and that one day one of us would be alone without the other, but neither of us had seen it coming so soon nor in a way associated with such horror.

The devil put out his foot and pushed me into the current, and although I tried to tell Aleksey something very important, I had not the time, for the current seized me as voraciously as it seized all things, and I was in the roar and the swirl and the icy-cold horror, heading at a dizzying speed toward an even greater terror.

I was on my back, facing the sky, and that was all I could see, for I was bound to the log, but I was grateful for this. I did not want to see what was coming. I could hear it, though, and feel it in every single fiber of my being.