Midnight Eyes Page 17

  It had taken two days for their bodies to be found. They had been thrown into a ditch beside the stream, seemingly the victims of bandits as their bodies had been stripped of everything of value.

  The ring had been stolen along with everything else, but that had hardly seemed to matter.

  As Imogen had sat in vigil in the small chapel between her parents, she had been so numb with her grief that she had been able to do no more than sit there holding their hands in the darkness. She hadn’t cried. She had wept so much and so bitterly after the accident had robbed her of sight that there seemed to be no tears left for the beloved parents that she had blithely sent to their deaths.

  But the numbness hadn’t lasted forever. The pain had then become almost beyond enduring.

  In her dark agony she might have found some comfort in the ring and the love it represented, but it had seemed to be lost to her forever.

  Her hand clenched tightly around the ring again. It should be lost forever. Roger shouldn’t have had it all these years. He hadn’t even been there when their parents had died. When Imogen had been found unconscious at the bottom of the stairs, it hadn’t taken her parents long to put together what had happened. Their father had been so furious, he had flogged Roger to within an inch of his life, then banished him forever from the family estates. Roger had slunk off to London willingly enough.

  He was able to return only after the death of their parents, when he was master of all.

  He shouldn’t have even known that the ring was missing. The cold reality of the ring in her hand killed the smallest part of her, that part that had been foolish enough to have hope.

  There was no hope for her now, not when her parent’s murderer had now set his sights on her. Giving her the ring, Roger had known that he was giving her evidence of his darkest deed, but he had also been declaring that she would never be able to use it against him. He would make sure of that.

  Imogen clamped down on her sudden need to expel the bile from her stomach. Her fingers loosened around the ring till it rested gently in her shaking hands as she fought the desire to hurl it as far away from her as she could.

  Instead, she lifted it to her chest protectively.

  She would keep it, just as Roger had known she would. The game had changed, had become deadly, and that was what Roger wanted her to remember every time she felt the ring. He wanted her to know that she was in mortal danger, and there was not a thing she could do to save herself.

  A cold sweat beaded on her back and slid down her spine. She clenched her teeth to break off the scream that rose in her throat. It would do no good, she realized bleakly.

  She heard Robert’s strangely hesitant “Imogen?” behind her and her spine straightened instantly, as if pulled up by an invisible string.

  She quickly slipped the ring onto her finger, not once questioning her instinct to hide it from Robert. She barely noticed that it fitted perfectly as she stuffed the parchment into her girdle and ran a trembling hand over her cheeks. She dreaded the thought of finding them wet with memories. She would hate to give that weapon to yet another enemy.

  She need not have worried. They were as dry as her heart was cold.

  “Imogen?” Robert repeated softly. “Is all well?”

  She could hear his annoyance, but he quickly got himself back under control. What a clever man, she thought wildly, able to stop being the king’s butcher at will.

  She turned to him and her smile was as bright as it was brittle. “Yes, why wouldn’t all be well? Did you really think that the poor little messenger might harm my person?”

  “What exactly did your brother want?” he asked calmly enough.

  He wanted to tell me he now had a partner, Imogen thought cynically. She shrugged her shoulders with a careful negligence. “Not much, really. I’m surprised he wasted the good parchment on such frivolities.” She couldn’t seem to find control and her voice rose shrilly. That wouldn’t do, she thought with numb panic. She couldn’t let him know just how much she was hurting and she tried to draw herself back under control, but she wasn’t as good at it as Robert was. “He just wrote to ensure my well-being. And yours, of course. That is all. I didn’t bother with the expense of more parchment for a reply.”

  She heard the rustle of his feet through the rushes as he began to pace the length of the room, perhaps trying to expend some of that ever-present restless energy she had come to know so well.

  For a moment she envied him that energy, envied him the release that mindless movement would give. She seemed frozen to the spot. In the absence of that release, the pain grew until it was almost too great for a mere mortal to support. She was being suffocated by her absolute stillness.

  “Damn him,” Robert swore suddenly, causing Imogen to flinch when he reached out and grabbed her shoulders in an almost-painful grip. “He is nothing to us, has no power over us, do you understand me? Believe me when I tell you that you have nothing to fear.”

  Imogen found herself cringing away from the contact.

  Roger had won. He had tainted it all, tainted her life with Robert. She couldn’t stop her shiver of revulsion at the corruption that she could feel growing deep inside of her and yet some part of her mourned as Robert dropped his hands quickly to his side, stung by her blatant rejection.

  A silence stretched between them and it grew into a chasm, a chasm Imogen knew she could now never bridge, even if she had wanted to.

  “Obviously there was more to this message than you have said.” Robert’s kept his voice carefully neutral. “I think I might just go and have the message read to me.”

  Imogen shook her head jerkily. “I wouldn’t bother. There is nothing in it to cause any excitement.” She felt no triumph in the knowledge that she wasn’t lying. The poison wasn’t to be found in the words but in the bitter memories they evoked.

  Robert’s silence spoke eloquently of his skepticism, but Imogen didn’t have the strength left to try and convince him otherwise. Let him read it, she thought listlessly. It would change nothing. The life that had filled her for months disappeared all at once and without it she barely had the strength to hold up her strangely hollow body.

  “Do what you will. I think I will retire for the night,” she murmured in a faraway, world-weary voice.

  “I’ll join you when I’ve got everything sorted down here. I’ll just go and get Mary to take you up.”

  She waved him away. The thought of being close to anyone just now, even the loyal Mary, made her skin creep. “I can manage the stairs by myself.” She walked slowly to the door, trailing a hand along the wall.

  “It doesn’t matter, you know” Robert’s voice sounded strangely hoarse.

  “What doesn’t?” she asked lifelessly.

  “Whatever he’s said and done; it doesn’t matter. He has no power over you or I. Not here, not anymore.”

  She nodded her head obediently, but her heart knew that he was lying. Roger held her still, held her so tightly that she could scarcely breathe. He would continue to hold her, no matter where she went, no matter how far, he would hold her until the day he killed her.

  Robert lied.

  The next morning she woke to the feeling of bile rising from her stomach. She only just made it to the chamberpot in time and seemed to spend a lifetime emptying the entire contents of her stomach and much more besides.

  She slumped down onto the floor beside it and rolled herself into a ball, waiting for the nausea to end, waiting for the room to stop spinning. She rocked herself slowly, trying to absorb the silence and emptiness of the bedchamber into the chaos of her mind.

  Robert was already gone and if she hadn’t lain awake all night in their bed listening to the regular sound of his breathing, she might never have known that he had been there at all. He had risen silently long before dawn and dressed without a sound. She had listened to the sudden stillness that had filled the chamber moments before she had heard the door quietly close behind him.

  Only then had she dare
d to allow herself sleep.

  To have woken up with this all-consuming sickness was a perfect end to a perfect night filled with Roger and the cold fear he had mercilessly brought back into her life, she thought listlessly. There was no longer any room left in her heart for anything else, no room in her mind for thoughts that weren’t tainted by that fear.

  She even feared to sleep. A part of her longed for the oblivion that it promised but, as she knew all too well, the second she sought its refuge, the nightmares would take control.

  More than anything, it horrified her to think of what she might do in their power. In that place of perfect weakness she might try to climb into Robert’s arms in search of his strength. She longed for the strength to be found in his embrace.

  It was a strength she could no longer afford to count on.

  The uncertainty Roger had fed her with such relish was spawning its dark fruit, she realized, with a nearly hysterical giggle that ended in a final dry retch into the chamberpot.

  She closed her eyes for a moment, moving seamlessly from black to black, but even in that darkness, the dawn had to be faced. It took a great act of will to drag herself from off the floor and away from the stench of the chamberpot.

  She had no idea how to live in this strange new day. It was entirely alien. Gone was the light and energy that had been slowly penetrating her darkness. She barely had the will to move one foot after the other, but somehow she managed. She moved quietly through the day, and the only satisfaction to be found in it was that she survived.

  She even managed to survive the cold formality that had descended between Robert and herself.

  She knew that the walls between them were of her own construction, but she lacked the strength to even attempt to tear them down. Not that Robert seemed prepared to scale them either. He retreated behind them, silently waiting like a predator in the shadows.

  The evening meal had been a torture of courtesy and politeness. Gone was all laughter and tenderness. In their place stood a cold nothing, and it was a coldness that was infesting the whole Keep, subduing all of the occupants. They all watched their lord and lady warily, puzzled by the sudden rift that had sprung up between the couple overnight. They all went about their duties as if there had been a death.

  In a way, there had been. Imogen felt as if she was dying, disappearing a little more with each passing day.

  Even the escape of sleep was now denied her. Each night they lay only inches apart and she did nothing to bridge the gap and very quickly the inches became miles. She was alone, just as Roger wanted her to be, and surely he gloated over it with increasing relish in each new message that arrived at the Keep.

  The second one arrived not even twenty-four hours after the first, Robert bringing Roger’s messenger up to their chamber midmorning. Imogen had been propped up in bed, trying to swallow a few mouthfuls of bread to stop her stomach’s strident protests. The little bit she had managed to ingest turned to lead when Robert had ground out bitterly, “This idiot refuses to give me the message even though I have solemnly promised to have it read to you.”

  “I have my orders, sir,” the messenger said stiffly, obviously offended by Robert’s belligerent attitude.

  This time, the messenger was an older man, and Imogen wondered dispassionately what had happened to the child of yesterday as she heard Robert’s growl of, “Well, get on with it, then!”

  “Robert, if you would leave us,” she said softly, smiling bitterly as she realized she was now as eager as Roger to banish Robert.

  Not that Robert seemed to mind.

  He left without even a token protest this time, Imogen realized absently. Roger had been right. The loving husband had been an act. A faultless, unbelievably tempting act. She was almost grateful for that insight, as it helped to numb her. She listened to the messenger’s light voice with a growing fatalism:

  My dearest first love,

  I hope you have enjoyed the small token I sent you. Giving it to you now seems almost like completing the pledge I made to you all those years ago in the tower room at home. Do you remember that tower, Sister, dear?

  I had thought to come for my normal visit, but have decided to wait till Robert has had more of a chance to do his job. Is he still suiting you, dearest one? I think of him as my little gift to you. I watch the two of you with much anticipation and I’m sure neither of you will disappoint. It wouldn’t be a good idea to disappoint me. Remember, the king stands with me. Lies with me as well, which I find terribly convenient.

  I shan’t tell you how close to you I am at the moment. I do not want to deprive you of the pleasure you will get out of trying to guess, though here is a small clue: I am as close to you as your last breath.

  This time he claimed to be her “loving brother.”

  She quickly dismissed the messenger, wanting to be alone with her self-disgust. He knew he’d won. His gloating was clear in the anonymous voices of the messengers he was sending her, and she was letting him. There was nothing she could do about it. All of the battles she had won in the last months came to naught if they could be lost so easily.

  And there was nothing she could do about it.

  She had always known it would come to this even as she had tried to deny it, had always known the happiness she had found with Robert was an illusion designed to crush her utterly. It had all been part of Roger’s plan. It was this certainty that chilled her to the bone, freezing the scepter of hope that had till then been staying tenaciously alive.

  It was like losing her sight to those cold stone steps all over again. Just as Roger had known it would. That damn man knew her too well, Imogen realized as she leaned over the bed to retch the pieces of bread into the chamberpot. He knew her so well that her destruction was a certainty, and he planned to kill her with memories and tantalizing glimpses of what could have been.

  She sat bolt upright in bed as she realized with a dawning horror that he had told her that years ago, although she hadn’t understood it. He had told her not with words but with stone. The tower. She had always assumed he had built a replica of the stone tower that had claimed her sight as a cold testament to his power over her, as a cold memorial to all of her pain, but it was more than that, she finally understood. It was the key to her ultimate destruction, Roger’s macabre way of letting her know the method of her own demise.

  He was always going to win, and Imogen couldn’t help but admire his skill even as she felt herself ceasing to exist. He played an amazing game, and played to win.

  Always.

  Chapter Eleven

  Robert swung the axe violently down, barely noticing that the log obediently split in two as he mechanically reached for another. Then another, and another.

  At some point he had absentmindedly discarded his tunic and the sweat ran down his exposed torso, glistening along the ridges of muscles on his abdomen. A dark lock of hair tried to fall over his face, but sweat held it in place at least for a moment, until he impatiently swept it back, then he hefted the axe over his head once more.

  He barely noticed the heat of the midday sun beating down on his exposed head, concentrating instead on each muscle as it stretched and shifted to do the repetitive work, relentlessly seeking oblivion in physical labor. Perhaps, if he worked his body till it was exhausted, he could achieve a state of numb bliss.

  It wasn’t working, he admitted grimly to himself as he brought the axe down. His mind refused to be silenced, ruthlessly following the well-trod circles of fear and anger, just as it had been doing ever since the arrival of Roger’s first message. With each note Imogen received, the clamoring inside him grew louder.

  He watched helplessly while she seemed to fade a little more each time. He couldn’t reach her. No matter what he did or said, the essence of her had somehow slipped through his fingers. She had disappeared into her nightmares where he couldn’t reach her, and it frightened the hell out of him. He had never felt so impotent, so unsure of what to do, and he hated it. He seemed to be sitti
ng idly by while his whole world fell apart silently around him, but there was nothing he could do to stop the decay. That bitter knowledge invoked in him an unholy desire to break things. Lots of very large, human-sized things.

  The axe sailed through the air and found its target easily. Lifting the blade quickly he settled a new log on the block and with a fluid movement brought the axe down again, but the violence of metal slicing through wood was nowhere near enough to appease the rage that roiled in him. He had only to think of the hollow, brittle shell that surrounded Imogen, and once more he felt the battle rage fill his every particle.

  He ground his teeth as visions of the farce that had been the last month filled his mind like taunting shades. He was slowly sinking in a leaden sea of politeness, damn it. Imogen treated him absentmindedly, as if he was some kind of half-remembered acquaintance. Really, she did it so well that even Robert was sometimes hard-pressed to recall that they were husband and wife, friends and lovers.

  Robert deliberately brought the axe down harder, enjoying the pain that shot through his arm as beguiling memories taunted him, memories of what had very nearly been his. Memories of Imogen as she had almost become.

  Almost.

  Gone was the glorious woman he had watched learning to embrace the world. In her place existed a mere shadow, barely able to sustain enough life to smile. It was an endless torture. Not only did he have to watch her spirit dying before his eyes, but he also had to stand by as each day her body became a little frailer, faded that little bit more.

  Sometimes, Robert wasn’t sure which frightened him the most, although he suspected it would be the slow suicide that would be his ultimate enemy. If she willed herself out of existence, he would lose her forever.

  She had always been an ethereal being, but now her physical fragility had become a macabre effigy with an eerie appearance of life in death. Her pale skin had taken on a bruised translucency, her eyes dull, lifeless nothings rimmed by gray circles. In bed at night he didn’t dare touch her, frightened that she might just shatter in his arms.