Aleksey's Kingdom (A Royal Affair #2)(61)

He was blind in one eye, that orb milky and staring unseeing at me. The other was still bright, glaring at me fixedly. But it did not help his face much, this one good eye. He had no nose, and his lips, eaten away by the disease and the putrescence, had regressed, showing his mouth as the mouth of a skull: the elongated teeth that appear in death. He had only a few stumps left, and they were bloodied from mouth ulcers.

He was ruinous, and I felt that I was giving him mercy when I took his life.

He died mumbling his words in Latin. I think my Powponi ones had been more powerful in the end. I was standing. He was not.

I ran back to Aleksey.

I had said farewell to him, and he thought that I was dead.

I hoped he had worked out by now that the beast from the water that wore the hair of the dead had been me.

He was struggling with his bindings still. I fell to my knees beside him. Whatever it is that comes over a man in the extremity of battle was in me still, and I could hear my heart beating fiercely in my chest, the blood roaring in my ears as loud, it seemed to me, as the rage of the water. Sometimes, I wonder if I was already hearing the constant echo of my plummet, which I hear now. Aleksey looked to me, filthy, disheveled, and starved as he was, like the angel the devil had thought him to be. A fallen angel in the snow. My shining star. The only worship I allowed myself.

I put my hand to his shoulder.

Suddenly, I cried out and recoiled in horror.

Something had emerged from him.

It stung me.

For one awful moment, I thought he had been… possessed, that the witch had left me with the shell only of the angel and that inside a demon lay.

It was nothing of the sort. It was a sharpened stick that emerged from his flesh and passed right into my hand, and over his pierced shoulder I saw an imp, grinning.

The child.

I had forgotten the boy. He had revived from his stupor by the tree. I tore my hand off the stick and reached for him, but he was gone into the trees.

Aleksey nodded that he was all right. Even now he was pulling the stick out. I closed my eyes for one moment, for strength, and then took off after the small, fleeing figure.

Other than the roar that plagued me, it was eerily quiet in the woods.

I had noted earlier that there was no game. It was more than that. The woods now held some of the bleak awfulness that Etienne had claimed. If I had come across a clearing with the hollow bodies of the Black Crow, I would not have been unduly surprised.

I could not see the child. I had no hope of hearing him, given the dull rush of water in my ears. I crouched down, and in the way I had been taught, I became one with the trees. This creature may have been raised in the tribes as I had, but he was only five.

I underestimated him.

He dropped upon me from a height, the fall knocking me to the ground, and before I could regain my feet he came at me. He had lost his stick, but with his small fingers extended he went for my eyes. I have seen snakes strike with less speed and dexterity than that demon child struck that day. His filthy nails grazed my cheek as I darted my head away. I was still on my back from the fall, and he then brought his foot down upon my naked groin, hard, all his weight behind the attack, and then, once more, he was gone.

You have to be a man, and a naked one at that, to understand the pain such a thing can occasion. I curled up, groaning piteously, the blood dripping from my hand mesmerizing me as I waited for the debilitating pain to lessen. When I could rise, I clambered slowly to my feet, testing my stretch to full height.

He came at me again. This time something wacked hard against the backs of my bare knees, and, once more, disbelievingly, I was down on all fours in the snow.

But I had wits enough now to realize my naked arse made a particularly good target, so I rolled and sprang as best I could into a defensive crouch. He had conveniently dropped the branch with which he’d hit me, and I picked it up, testing its heft against my bleeding palm.

I now saw my error. I had been too long in the civilized world where good Christians saw a difference between a man and a boy, giving childhood its due. I had not been raised so, and neither had this creature. He was all savage, and his size and age were immaterial to him, and must become so to me.

I was immensely strong, but as with most men, I suppose, I felt a natural reluctance to use that strength against a child. I cast that consideration aside, thought about Faelan and my beloved horses and all the ill that had befallen us on this journey, and I turned toward the darker part of the woods and found myself again in that shadowy realm. My true self.

I saw a flicker of movement this time before the attack. Even so, something glanced painfully off my brow, and a warmth coursed down my face. He had thrown a rock. Within a second it had been returned to him, and I heard a shocked, angry cry. Good. I’d hit him.

I had thrown instinctively, but now I knew where he was. If he changed position I would have him. If he stayed put… well, I would have him either way. I began to advance.

He did exactly what I would have done had our positions and relative sizes been reversed: he came for me.

It was like fighting a cat. He was small, feral, scratching and screaming and biting. I do not know if he climbed me or I lifted him, but he wrapped around my face, strong, wiry limbs, and a stink that made me gag, and then, to my horror, as I retched, I felt something in my throat. It was awful. I could not make sense of it, and wondered if I had finally succumbed to the poison of the poppet, before I realized with equal horror that he had thrust his small arm down into my mouth. Was he trying to rip out my tongue? I had seen this done in another time and another life, and as his fist thrust farther, all my gag instinct kicked in, making me panic and heave and retch. I staggered back, trying to pull him off, but he held as tight to me as a barnacle upon the hull of a ship, and then I could not breathe at all.