“Come on, this is booooring,” one of the girls said, and pulled at her boyfriend’s arm.
“No, wait, I got one more,” he said. “Why do you stick a baby in a boiling cauldron feet first? So you can see the look on its face!”
Satisfied that they’d asserted their moral superiority, they pushed their way through the crowd to the main road and disappeared in the traffic. A ripple of relief passed through the spectators. “Goddam spoiled brats,” one man muttered. “Assholes,” snarled another.
Rhiannon hadn’t moved. She remained hunched over, small and weak and broken, a shadow of the glamorous prisoner I’d seen only weeks earlier. Her filthy hair hung stringy and loose, where previously it had shimmered like gold.
Murmuring conversation resumed around her, and the watchers drifted away to their respective jobs. Finally there were too few people for me to hide very well, and I turned to depart. Although we’d only met once, I couldn’t count on her not recognizing me. I couldn’t count on anything about her.
Movement caught my eye. A tiny bird dropped from its perch on the bars across the top of the cage and hovered for just a moment beside Rhiannon’s slumped form. I couldn’t see if it touched her or not. Then it skittered away back into the sky.
Rhiannon took a deep breath, and suddenly sat upright. She tossed her unkempt, dirty hair from her face and looked out at the watchers. It was as if somehow the bird had given her a shot of energy, or as the one in my dream had done, taken away a big chunk of her anguish.
I recalled the birds on her windowsill in the prison tower the day I met her. Had they been the same kind? The same birds that lurked around Epona Gray’s cottage?
I discreetly hung around the area for the rest of the morning and watched the other watchers. Most people simply ignored Rhiannon, and she paid them no mind. She occasionally looked around or changed position, but most of the time she just sat, head down, immobile.
The resemblance to Epona Gray had been strong before, but now it was uncanny. Rhiannon had lost so much weight that her once-show-stopping curves had straightened into angular lines, and the occasional ragged cough spoke of potential illness. Like Epona, she was dying. Unlike Epona, I might be in time to help.
When a summer storm hit shortly after lunch she sought no shelter, but remained on her stool as the rain beat down. I gathered it was the closest thing to a bath she got. As I watched from beneath a shop awning, she cupped her hands and drank the collected water. She raised her face to the sky, eyes closed, and let the rain pummel her. In the gray light she looked blood-drained and colorless.
My thoughts turned to Phil, ensconced in his luxurious castle. I didn’t have to see him to know his condition. He was in agony as well, knowing his wife and child were suffering and unable to do anything to help them, except trust me. Trust the guy who’d caused his sister’s death.
I had a theory that explained how the woman in the cage could be both Epona Gray and Rhiannon. If I was right, I was a goddamned genius. If not, then it was a cold, heartless universe and I didn’t want to live in it anymore.
Thunder boomed overhead. Rhiannon flinched.
I would know soon.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Fifteen minutes,” Anders said.
“We talked about twenty.”
“Yeah, well, it’s an imperfect world.”
He pressed the key to Rhiannon’s cell into my hand. Then he went to wait at the guard station where, moments earlier, he’d dismissed the two men on duty. They had not been happy about it, and left with promises to go straight to their division commander. Those lost five minutes were probably a measure of how upset they were.
The room inside the wall had originally been a siege armory, and the old weapon racks remained, rusted and empty. A bunk allowed one guard to sleep while the other remained on duty. A table bore evidence of a recent card game. And at one end of the room, a new wall closed off what was now the queen’s chamber.
Except for the narrow meal slot, the inner cell door had not been opened since Rhiannon was first incarcerated. The key took some real effort to turn in the lock, and the bolt mechanism scraped like a frying cat. The lamp from the antechamber threw a shaft of yellow light through the opening.
Awakened by the noise, Rhiannon sat on the edge of her bed and clutched the blanket around her. Her ragged clothes, still damp from the rain, lay neatly across the table. “Who are you?” she gasped, fear in her voice. “Please, no one’s supposed to be in here.”
“That’s true,” I said as I lit a candle. “Not even you.” The room smelled of sweat and dirt, a damp odor that invoked the creepy feel of mold and fungus. I held up the light so she could see my face.
“Mr. LaCrosse,” she said blankly.
“We don’t have a lot of time,” I said as I put the candle on the table. I grabbed the blanket and yanked it away from her; the thin fabric ripped as she tried to protect her modesty.
“No, please!” she gasped, pitiful and helpless. She wrapped her arms around her emaciated torso and pressed her legs together. “This isn’t right, you shouldn’t do this,” she said without looking at me.
I pushed her back on the cot, held her down with one hand over her mouth and used my knee to part her legs. She screamed, but it was so thin and muffled no one outside the room could’ve heard it. She had no strength to fight, but she thrashed and struggled as best she could.
I lifted her left leg to see her inner thigh in the candlelight. And there it was: the same horseshoe scar as Epona Gray. I’d touched her, so I knew she was tangible; and now that I’d confirmed the scar, I knew a lot more. I released her, climbed off the bed and tossed the blanket back at her.
She wrapped herself in it and huddled back against the wall. “Why did you stop?” she spat. “Was I too dirty? Now that I’m just a common prisoner, I don’t even rate your brutality? Is that it?”
I couldn’t look at her. My voice was very quiet when I said, “I needed to satisfy myself about something. Now I have.”
Her fury, though, was just getting started. “You still think I’m lying about my amnesia, don’t you? Well, look around you. Would I lie just so I could be kept here for the rest of my life? What secret could be worse than this?” She tied the blanket under her arms and got to her feet. “You said you were Philip’s friend. That meant you were supposed to be mine, too, because he loved me then! Where were you when he was condemning me?”
I faced her. “You didn’t kill your son. I know it, I can prove it, and even more, I know exactly where he is.”
She did not react for a long moment. Finally, in a tiny voice, she asked, “Where?”
“I’ll get to that. First I need you to do something that’s going to seem kind of strange, but if you don’t, you and anyone you care about will never be truly safe.” I reached into my pocket and brought out the small opaque jar I’d claimed at the Dwarf’s house to hold my souvenir. I opened the top. “Hold out your hands. And it’s pretty disgusting, so be ready.”
I poured the contents into her cupped palms. She jumped, but didn’t drop it. She turned slowly toward the candle, as if more light would make it less repulsive. “What is it?”
“It’s a heart.”
She looked at me, eyes wide inside their dark circles. “A human heart?” she whispered.
I shrugged. “Maybe.”
At least it had been once, when a rough-hewn sailor washed ashore on a beach five centuries earlier. And when I’d attacked the Dwarf in his little sanctuary, pinned him with my weight and used my knife to carve the organ from his chest, deep down I truly thought it would turn out to be a normal human heart. Certainly the hot blood that spewed from him seemed mortal, as did his terrified screams for help. Thanks to his overconfidence, though, there was no one in the house to hear them.
But it wasn’t until I held the bloody thing in my hand and stood up that I realized the full extent of Epona’s curse. Five hundred years earlier she’d doomed him to a life of unending pain and torment; that meant that even
