Lord of Legends

The endless night of his eyes threatened to swallow her. “Let me go,” he said.

“Not today.”

Deliberately he pressed his face to the bars. The welts appeared before her eyes. She gave a cry and rushed to push him back, her hands thrust through the bars to press the firm muscles of his shoulders.

“Are you mad?” she cried. “You … you …”

She found herself near tears and took control of her wayward emotions, withdrawing her hands before he could think to grab them.

“I shall not be blackmailed,” she said, anger spilling out of her like poison. “I have seen what happens. You …”

Heal yourself. As he’d healed her thumb. Now it was happening again. The marks were disappearing, gone in the space of a dozen short breaths.

Ash was someone, something, even she could not define. Either she was beginning to lose her mind, or he was more than.

Not even a moan of protest could make its way past the constriction in her throat. She gathered up the lantern and fled … ignominiously, thoughtlessly, and as swiftly as her feet would carry her. She had stumbled halfway down the stairs before she remembered to return and lock the door.

Once it was done, she leaned against the heavy wood and sobbed for breath. She knew she ought to go back inside immediately, face her fears, prove to herself that the conclusion she had just reached was utter nonsense.

But she found she could not. As she walked away from the folly, the key still in her hand, she comforted herself with the knowledge that Ash had everything he needed for the time being and she would return before his keeper made another visit.

A little time. That was all she required to compose herself, to plan, to think rationally again. She must be prepared to find and question the keeper, and to continue her visits without arousing Vivian’s suspicions. She must keep her wits about her at all times.

Especially when she faced his direct, merciless gaze, tempered only by that strange, contradictory innocence. That desperation combined with arrogance and subtle mockery. That mysterious past, that handsome face, that magnificent body.

She would never be free of him until she had all the answers.

ASH—FOR THAT was now his name—held on to the bars until the pain became more than even he could bear. He released them, flexing his fingers until his hands ceased burning, and sat in his usual place where the cool curved wall met the cage of iron.

She was gone. He had known she would leave him; she had another existence, one he could not touch. Yet she had given her word. And now he knew she would keep it. She could no more stay away than he could walk through the bars and out the door.

He dropped his head into his hands, weighted with sudden despair. He hadn’t meant to frighten her. His feelings would not be still, driven this way and that like golden hinds during the hunt.

Hunt.

The word stung worse than his flesh where it had touched Cold Iron, but he still could not remember why.

A drift of warming air spiraled down from the small openings in the top of his cage, carrying with it the smell of flowers. Poor, pallid things they must be to produce such a faint and common scent, yet he would have given everything to touch them.

Everything but his freedom. Even if he should never see Mariah again. He would surrender the taste of her flesh, the softness of her skin. He would sacrifice the chance to hear her voice again, reading stories in which bears turned into men and were saved by the love of beautiful women. He would no longer wonder why his body tightened when she gazed upon him, or how she would appear without the ugly mass of cloth she wore.

Yet he could not win his freedom without her.

Freedom to what purpose? From whence had he come? What did he seek?

He held up his hands, turning them forward and back. They were still unfamiliar to him, though he knew much time had passed since he had been put behind these bars. He rose and stared down at his legs, at his feet in their “stockings.” His limbs, too, had been wrong from the beginning, of that much he was certain. He could make them obey him, but that did not alter their strangeness. Nor could he explain the changes in sight, smell and hearing that rendered his senses so dull and distant. And when he had spoken to Mariah of a tail, he had not meant to make her smile. The question had come from memory, from a time when he had been other than he was now.

Beautiful. Perfect.

His gaze fell on the basin. He knelt before it and stared into the clean water. He touched his jaw, his cheek, the line of his nose.

Human.

He jerked back, the word ringing inside his head. He knew it well, though Mariah had never spoken it nor read it in her book. It described what she was, just as much as the word “woman.” He touched his chest, feeling the organ beating beneath his ribs.

Am I not human?

He looked into the water again. The face was that of a man, like Mariah’s and yet different. A face he almost recognized. But behind that face he saw another, pale as his hair, as different in form as iron was from silver: long, elegant, noble in shape and form. From the broad forehead sprang a horn, spiraled and sculpted as if from stainless ivory. A horn of incalculable value to those who would use it to command the obedience of others.

He touched his own forehead, naked and smooth. But the appendage was not entirely gone. It was only hidden, like the gleaming white hide and pearlescent hooves and the speed to outrun either human or Fane.

I am not human.

Rocking back on his heels, he felt the knowledge sweep through him in a rush like liquid fire. Not human, but rather that other he had seen in the water. A lord. A king.

A unicorn.

He tossed his head as the name slipped out of his grasp. He searched through the images that had come to him so suddenly, and another word arrested his thoughts.

Fane.

In his shattered memory he saw something that looked like a man, tall and wearing garments that sparkled as they caught the light. But its true self was to a human as Ash’s former shape was to this foreign body he wore: seductive, certain of its power, outshining everything that stood in its presence.

Fane. His enemy. The one who had sent him into exile.

Shuddering with anger, Ash bared his teeth, and a growl rumbled deep in his chest. They had been together, the Fane and Donnington. They had conspired against him. They had made him nothing.

Nothing except to Mariah, who had given him a name and a purpose, though that purpose was only beginning to take shape in his mind. Escape, that first. Then find the ones who had done this, and.

No. There was more. More he must do.

A well of longing opened up inside him. A yearning to be again what he had been, to live his life among others of his own kind.

Why am I here? Why have I been punished?

There were no answers. His memory remained clouded; Mariah had no idea who he was now, far less what he had been in that other world. But punished he had been, driven from his home, given this mortal body in which to suffer pain and humiliation.

He upended the basin and watched the water darken the hard stone floor. Only a few moments ago he had been thinking of surrendering Mariah in exchange for his freedom. Now he began to see the course he must take. Mariah was not merely the path to escape.

Mariah was the key. The key to everything.

To give her up would be disaster.

Ash returned to his usual place and slid down against the wall. Mariah would come to him again. And when she did, he would begin to remember why she, more than anything else in the world, could save him.

CHAPTER FOUR

“WHY DID THE countess take Lord Donnington’s clothing from his room?”