Wine of the Gods 08: Dark Lady Read online

  The Dark Lady

  Pam Uphoff

  Copyright © 2013 Pamela Uphoff

  All Rights Reserved

  ISBN

  978-0-9839469-9-1

  This is a work of fiction.

  All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional.

  Any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  Chapter Forty-four

  Chapter Forty-five

  Chapter Forty-six

  Chapter Forty-seven

  Chapter Forty-eight

  Chapter Forty-nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-one

  Chapter Fifty-two

  Chapter Fifty-three

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Other Titles by Pam Uphoff

  Excerpt from an Upcoming Release

  Chapter One

  Winter Solstice, 1376 Post Exile

  Mount Frost, Kingdom of the West

  :: Save us, save us! :: Terrified voices rang in her head.

  She grabbed her head. Shield! She couldn't. There was no mental energy left.

  :: Lady! Protect us! ::

  "I can't. I can't do any more." Tears froze on her face.

  A fireball roared across the sky, west to east low on the horizon. Thousands of voices screamed in her head, not just terror; pain now, and the horrible crunching impact of dark static that was death. She couldn't shut them out and she screamed with them.

  "I'm sorry! I'm sorry!" She cringed away from the voices, tried to hide from the pain.

  I didn't do enough. Pieces are still going to hit. I didn't do enough, I can't do any more. I've used it all.

  She rolled off the shelf of rock where she lay, and thumped down two more to the sloped crest of a giant mountain, soaring above the surrounding lesser peaks. She had to get down. If she couldn't see the meteors, maybe she wouldn't hear the voices.

  She ran, staggered, tripped and slid on the snow until she could catch a rock with cold numbed fingers. She tried to not watch the fireballs, hundreds of burning bits of dust and rock, a few explosions from superheated ice or ice laden porous rock, or the rock itself.

  There was a path. Somewhere under the snow. She'd walked this path nearly every year of her life. She couldn't remember her life. She fled the screaming, dying people in her head, fell and slid, scrambled to get lower. The snow was illuminated by the meteors that still streaked across the southern sky. The terror of a world continued, with flashing glimpses of roaring forest fires that rolled over villages and towns.

  There was a corridor.

  Then she was in a village. But now the voices were close, not many, but loud. Tearing at her mind.

  And the screaming was still there. She fled the village. The big barn on the outskirts, another corridor right there. A dome of rock in a bubble. She scratched at it and opened the door. It was full of bronze statues and heavy with potential. Alive.

  She looked desperately at the statue of a laughing boy on a horse. "The screams would go away if I went through a gate, wouldn't they? But I don't have a gate, they're so far away." A statue of a wagon and a team of horses. "Too slow." A saddled and bridled horse. "Are you fast, horse?" The statue seemed to think it was, so she peeled off the covering to find the real horse underneath and mounted. "Take me to a gate. Fast." Then all she could do was cling. And hope the horse knew where to go.

  Half a world away, fires raged and people died. She couldn't keep the pain out, and reeled in the saddle. The horse shifted to keep her weight centered and kept moving.

  She endured. Tried to not-feel. Tried to not-think. Tried to hide. Tried to exist in the moment, no past pain to remember. No past.

  The horse staggered a bit, grunted as he tackled a hill. There was a glowing spot up there . . .

  The horse leaped into the glow.

  The screams chopped off, the pain faded.

  Silence. Blessed silence.

  She slid off the horse and collapsed onto winter killed grass.

  "I'm sorry. I tried to save you."

  She vaguely wondered if she could ever go back . . . to wherever that was. She stared up at the twilight, deep blue sky, mind empty of everything but relief.

  Grass all around, no people, no buildings. She still hurt, but it was all her own pain, and no one else's. She lay there, thinking nothing, doing nothing. Slowly, energy seeped back. The sky brightened. Not twilight, dawn. She turned her head, saw the horse standing legs braced, exhausted. Lines of dried sweat salt on his black coat. Head sagging.

  She forced herself back to her feet. "Oh, Phantom. What have I done to you?"

  She jerked at the cinch, pulled it loose and pulled the saddle off, staggering backwards and falling down with the saddle on top of her.

  The horse laid down with a tired grunt, stretched out on his side.

  She struggled out from under the saddle, untangled a half empty canteen and crawled to him.

  He was breathing normally, the sweat dried, crusted with salt from . . . how long had they travelled? All day? Several days? Fast. She'd pushed the pace – and the horse. And her planning ability had not been at its best. She looked at her fingers, a bit numb, a bit discolored, dark . . . nasty.

  "Frostbite? Bad case of frostbite." She unbuckled the bridle and eased the bit out of the horse's mouth. When she opened the canteen, he rolled back up to his chest and drank the water from the palm of her hand as she poured it slowly.

  She stood up shakily and looked around. Early dawn, a bright rim of the sun just lifting over the horizon, but enough light to see empty rolling hills of winter killed grass and a stream bed with a dark line down the middle of it. Water, she hoped.

  When she was halfway down the hill, the horse heaved himself to his feet, and limped stiffly down to join her. She filled the canteen in the trickle of water and the horse drank slowly. He didn't seem in too bad a shape, apart from fatigue and the sweat salt that must be irritating his skin. She patted pockets pointlessly, then took off jacket, sweater, vest and blouse, and soaked the blouse to wipe him down.

  She shivered in the cold breeze, and her breasts ached, crusted dried milk on her brassier. "Do I have a baby?" she asked the horse. He nodded, then threw his head up in alarm and looked up the hill. He scrambled out
of the stream bed and trotted back up the hill, stiff, and perhaps favoring his near foreleg.

  She grabbed her jacket and climbed more slowly after him. Her feet didn't hurt, but they felt numb, and she had a suspicion that might be worse than hurting. The horse was nuzzling the saddlebags. "I hope you're after oats. People don't generally keep babies in saddlebags." She opened the flap and looked in.

  Pale hair, rosebud mouth. The baby couldn't be more than a few days old. "Old Gods!" she sank down and pulled the baby out. It, she? blinked and cried. Her breasts answered with aching leakage and she winced as she pulled stuck dried fabric away so she could nurse the baby. Then burp her, and change the soaked, dirty diaper, for a clean one from the saddlebag. Yes, a little girl, and hours old, not days. The cord was properly tied off, but it had been soaked by the wet diaper. Had the voices in her head drowned out a baby crying desperately in her saddle bag?

  "You can't be this new," she protested. "The horse had days of sweat on him."

  The horse had moved off, and was grazing. Did she have any oats for him? Did she have any food for herself?

  The baby fussed, and she nursed her again. The tiny girl was asleep in minutes.

  She dragged the saddle down to the stream bank before unpacking. She unrolled the bedroll strapped to the cantle and laid the baby on it. The other side of the saddle bag disgorged brushes and a halter, a canvas bucket and several small sacks of oats. A tightly rolled bundle of oiled canvas that she vaguely thought might be a tent. The baby's side held lots of diapers. Baby sized clothes, and clothes that she rather thought were hers. Money. Both coinage and letters of credit. And food. Packages wrapped in greased paper. The first held ham in a hard roll and she wolfed it down. Wine. Good grief, why amongst a ridiculous amount of stuff in her saddle bags did she have a baby and a bottle of wine?

  "Because it'll cure damn near anything short of death." She said, and wondered how she knew that. She reached into the saddlebag, yes, she'd even included a cork screw. She fumbled with numb fingers and aching muscles until she got the cork out. She poured a half a sack of oats into the canvas bucket and drizzled a half a cup of wine over them.

  She took a swig before she recorked the bottle. She took the oats up to the horse. He scarfed them all, and tossed his head and pranced.

  "The Wine of the Gods," she told him. And looking at her fingers, drank more, herself before she pried off her boots and washed her toes—in better shape than her fingers, barely—in the stream.

  She slept the rest of the day, waking only to feed and change the baby, and eat and drink and check the horse, and do some laundry . . . She slept most of the night too. Her fingers and toes looked both better and worse. Draining pustules, but filling out the hollows and sags. Hurting a bit. Her nose and ears hurt too. She wondered if there was a mirror in those bottomless saddlebags, but didn’t look. She drank more wine.

  The next morning she looked back at the glowing gate on top of the hill and shook her head. "There's a whole world on the other side of that gate. But I can't go back to where the screams are. So, Phantom, why don't we explore this world?"

  The horse nodded, or at any rate bobbed his head at the appropriate time, and she fed him oats, and dressed herself and the baby. The little blanket she wrapped the girl in was embroidered around the edges. Horses, dogs, and the word 'Quicksilver'. "Is that your name, little one? Or a family name? I have no idea." She hesitated. "I don't know what my name is. And . . . I think it will hurt if I try too hard to remember."

  Mounting was interesting, with a baby in arms. She was not about to put the baby back in the saddlebag. But Phantom obliged by standing up next to the bank of the stream, and she managed. "So, baby, is Quicksilver your name or ours? If it is yours may I share it? You look like a downy little bird, would you like to be Quail Quicksilver? Yes, I like that.

  "Let's go see if there is somewhere in this world where you and I can live."

  Chapter Two

  Monday, February 16, 3493 AD

  Jeramtown, Kingdom of Arrival

  Liz had always considered herself a practical sort of girl. Young woman, now. Perhaps I should have been a different sort of practical, she thought, seeing the rejection before tavernmaster Cordes even opened his mouth.

  "Now, Liz, we all know why you were turned out of the baron's house, and I can't have that sort of thing in here. The customers would be treating all the lasses like tarts."

  She unclenched her jaws. "I was dismissed for complaining about improper advances, not for accepting them!"

  He gave her cheek a pitying look, but looked up at the grit of stone under shod hooves.

  "I need a job. Any job." She turned as she spoke.

  They both stood there amazed, staring at the horse that had walked into the stable yard. The stallion was a good seventeen hands tall, both muscular and elegant. And absolutely black. The rider was wearing a riding suit of fine charcoal gray wool, with just a bit of blue showing at the neck. A woman. A very young woman. And the bundle in her arms was a baby.

  The rider looked down at the ground in perplexity, then looked at Liz. "Could you hold this baby for a moment?"

  Liz walked up to the stallion warily, but he pricked his ears in a friendly fashion. He might look like a warhorse, but he'd never been trained to be aggressive. Liz took the baby and the woman swung off and dropped easily to the ground.

  "Thank you. Phantom's so tall I've been having trouble getting up and down with the baby and all. Can't just sling her in to a saddlebag, after all." She looked back at the tavernmaster, "Is this your Inn?'

  "It is," Cordes hesitated. "M'lady. Er . . . "

  Liz tucked a smile away. How can you ask someone with a horse like that if she has any money?

  "I've been traveling and don't have any local currency." The lady told him, and held out a coin. "Can you accept such as this?"

  Liz blinked at the flash of real gold.

  Cordes swallowed. "Certainly M'lady. I'll have my wife spruce up a room, a suite, right away, and have Harv take your horse . . . " the poor man looked like he wanted to run in three directions at once.

  Liz squirmed as she came under the Lady's gaze. "Do I understand you are looking for a position?"

  "Yes Mum, M'lady." Liz eyed the horse wistfully. "I know babies, I have eight younger brothers and sisters."

  "Good. You are hired. We'll figure out how much I'm paying you after we figure out how to convert my money to the local coinage." She turned to her horse and reached up to unbuckle the saddle bags. "Show me your stables . . . "

  "Tavernmaster Cordes, M'lady . . . "

  "Quicksilver. From Ash in the Kingdom of the West." The Lady frowned suddenly.

  "I don't reckon I've ever heard of a kingdom in the west, M'lady, just the high desert and the ocean." The tavernmaster was backing into the stable as he spoke.

  "It's a long ways away, and everyplace is west of someplace else. I see that you do know how to keep a stable." As Harv scurried up, wide-eyed at the sight of the horse, she rubbed the animal's forehead. "Go with him, Phantom."

  She let the tavernmaster take the saddlebags and lead the way. Liz followed, still carrying the baby. It was a tiny thing, a few weeks old.

  "We've two rooms in the back, M'lady, they'll make you a nice quiet suite, even if we get a troop through and the front gets a bit rowdy. And a private privy."

  "Thank you." The lady took the saddle bags from him and slung them over one of the straight chairs around the table, as he unlocked the door between the rooms and bowed and scraped himself out. It was quite an indecent amount of space, even for a lady with actual gold coins.

  The baby woke then, and the lady unbuttoned her fine wool jacket, and the linen blouse under it. She wore a rather odd contraption around her breasts instead of a corset.

  "I'm sorry," she said. "I just grabbed you because I have trouble getting on and off a horse while carrying a baby, and didn't even ask your name."

  "I'm Liz, M'lady. Elizabeth Hinton."
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  "That's a nasty cut on your cheek. I heard you say something about rejecting advances, did he hit you?"

  "No, his father whipped me for complaining."

  "Hmm, yes, I've met men like that . . . somewhere." She frowned uncertainly, and pulled a fluffy white diaper from the saddle bag to throw over her shoulder and burp the baby. "How do you name babies, hereabouts? Are there rules about it?"

  Liz shook her head in confusion. "No, well if the baby is legitimate, he or she will have the last name, the family name, of the father. Bastards have their mother's family name, or no last name at all."

  "Umm, where I came from they went through the alphabet, and, and themes? I . . . have trouble remembering, sometimes . . . Q . . . I had an Aunt named Question."

  "That's a name? I mean, it's very interesting, but, we mostly just use . . . names for names." Liz jumped to take the baby and change her. The cord was dried but hadn't fallen off yet, the baby couldn't be more than three or four weeks old. She snuck a look at the Lady. Her stomach looked pretty flat, in the trousers she was wearing for riding. She was in pretty good shape for four weeks after giving birth. She looked like she'd been out in the sun a lot, recently, the skin on her nose and ears was peeling a bit.

  Liz finished pinning the diaper and handed her back after the Lady had readjusted her contraption.

  "So, is Quail Quicksilver an appropriate name for my daughter, or would you recommend calling her something else?"

  "Oh, no, birds are good names for girls, I know Robins, and Sparrows and Wrens. Flowers are good, and sometimes both girls and boys are named after the month they were born in."

  "Hmph, so if I was from here I'd have been named Winter Solstice?"

  Liz giggled. "December, maybe." She looked around at a tap on the door. At a nod from the lady she opened it.

  Madam Cordes herself, with a girl carrying a tray. "The master said the lady might like a bite, and some tea?"

  "Certainly," the lady had the baby's blanket tossed over her shoulder, covering the baby. "Come in, won't you?"

  "Well, I wouldn't want to presume . . . "

  "Oh, not a bit. I'm new here, and don't know anything about your town. It looked quite substantial as I rode up. How many people live hereabouts?"