Dark Horse

Fifty-Two

The stiletto hadn't fallen on to the floor as the woman Clio had seen with Leo's cousin on the gangplank had thought. When she'd realized the raw, twitching lump in the stone cottage on the hill had been human, the knife had fallen from her hand, but it landed on the mattress beside Clio.

Then Llagos arrived. Clio fought back the surge of terror, which gripped her now as violently as it had when his silhouette had first blocked out the sun as the woman went to fetch help. Through waves of pain and fear, Clio had been able to see what the woman could not, that Llagos had drugged her and followed her here. Two for the price of one, she'd thought bitterly. To her credit, the woman had wanted to fight. She'd backed up, inch by inch, towards the bed, feeling with her toe for the knife.

'Here,' Clio had rasped, but either the drug was too strong or her voice was too weak, because the woman didn't heed her. Then it was too late. The woman's legs had given way; she had collapsed in a heap. Stronger than he appeared, the priest had scooped her up and carried her out of the cottage, leaving his River of Fire victim screaming with pain and frustration.

How could the gods do this to her?

Llagos hadn't noticed the knife… but it didn't matter, because the knife was beyond her reach.

Or was it? Perhaps there was another way. Every time Clio strained against the chains, lightning bolts of agony wracked her body as the flesh from her wrist fell away. The bastard had burned her hands and feet first. Tied her down at the elbows and knees, then burned the flesh off her extremities before chaining those same terrible injuries to the bed. He wanted her to die in as much pain as he could possibly inflict, but just as a wild animal will gnaw off its own leg to free itself from a trap so Clio pulled at the irons now.

Twice she passed out from the pain, saw the white of her own bone through the blood. But each time she came to, she was an infinitesimal fraction closer to wriggling one apology for a hand free of its shackle.

Let me reach the knife before he returns.

Let me end this unendurable suffering.

With the woman in his arms, Llagos hadn't thought to close the door and now the light of a new dawn was flooding the cottage. Clio could hear whitethroats and warblers, the croak of a sea raven, the mewing of squirrels, and tears pricked her eyes. The pond — the pond she had hated — would be a silver mirror by now, reflecting another perfect and cloudless sky. Frogs would croak in its margins. Deer would come down to drink, bringing their spindly, spotted fawns with them, just as deer would be drinking at the stream which fed her Liburnian village. Whitethroats and warblers would be singing there, too, and a lump formed in Clio's throat. They had laughed at her, the villagers, because she had been drawn to the harp. Even her own family had ridiculed the waste of a fine, strong, Liburnian wife. A waste of good childbearing hips.

'If you must play an instrument,' her father had growled, 'why does it have to be something so bloody highfalutin?'

How could you explain to a woodsman that, in the beauty of the strings, Clio had discovered her soul? The harp freed her spirit, left it unburdened by dependence or convention. She became one with her music. Equally, though, it left her with a sense of being apart, of not belonging. As the years passed and her success grew, so the urge to return to Liburnia had grown stronger. What stopped her was pride; the prospect of going home poor. Told you the harp were kind of no bleeding instrument, her father would snarl. Poor and barren, the women would sneer. Clio would be a pariah in her own village. Unless, of course, she returned in style. The buggers would see her differently, then! Respect her for what she was, not what they thought she should be! The thread of fate began to unravel.

Men. All bloody bastards. They had put her in this position, the motherfuckers. Her father. Her brothers. Leo. Especially

Leo, who'd cheated her out of her share, even though she'd taken the risks. The anger drained out of her, sucking self-pity with it. Because finally, of course, there was Llagos. The biggest bastard of all. Far from the buck-toothed, spitting buffoon he made out, Llagos had systematically stripped her of clothes, her dignity and her flesh. But there was one thing no man, even Llagos, could defile. Clio's spirit.

Outside, the first spear of sunlight pierced the sky, sending a shaft of brilliance across the earth floor like a gold fissure. Redstarts and chaffinches, she noticed, had joined the avian chorus.

Finally, the footsteps she had been waiting for. Only once before in her life had Clio prayed. It had been in this same cottage, when the islanders had crowded around and she had prayed to her falcon god to give her strength. She had felt the brush of his wings against her cheek then. Just as she felt them now.

Clio blocked her mind against the approaching footfalls, the shadow that blocked out the gold, the fingernails that raked her blistered skin.

Instead she drank in the song of the warblers, the gentle rasp of the crickets and imagined the vivid blue of the sea, the liquid eyes of the deer, the soft touch of her mother's hand on her hair. From somewhere else, far away, she heard the gentle plucking of strings on a harp.

'I am coming,' she said.