The dark little room flashed out, the fire-splashed walls giving way to a crowd of people, screaming and shoving and threatening to trample him. Mircea tried to move away, while he figured out what was happening, but he couldn’t seem to control his body. And it wouldn’t have mattered even if he could.
Behind him, a double ring of guards circled the crowd, their swords out, blocking the way back. And ahead—damn it, he still couldn’t see! Until the screams became shrieks, and a huge fight broke out, sending dozens to the ground, and parting the crowd enough to show—
Oh God.
Not again!
Mircea stumbled back, but there was nowhere to go. And nowhere to look except for the caldron straight ahead, big as a ship and gleaming copper bright in the incongruously sunny day. Inside, a crowd of men floated motionless on the bubbling surface of the water, their long hair drifting around them, their skin sloughing off in pieces. Or else they writhed, screaming and fighting, lobster red but still trying to climb up the blistering sides, while a thick line of soldiers with spears shoved them back in.
Mircea tried to avert his eyes—he’d seen enough horrors this day! But they stayed glued to the scene nonetheless. Forcing him to watch as more men, waiting their turn alongside the caldron, used their chains to strangle their fellow prisoners out of pity, before they were boiled alive. While the vast crowd tore at their hair and cried and fought and—
Mircea finally looked away, but only because a woman, beautiful, desperate, and tear streaked, grabbed him. “Help us!” she breathed. “You’re on the Domi! Make her stop!”
Mircea followed her outflung arm, and saw another woman, raven haired and dark eyed, standing on top of a terrace, framed by the castle. She was watching the spectacle and laughing: at the sufferers, their families, him. Knowing he couldn’t do anything, that if he so much as muttered a word against her, he’d join them.
“I can’t help,” he babbled. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry—”
“Murderer!” the woman shrieked. “You may as well be killing us yourself! Do something! Those are your people!”
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry—”
“Stop saying that!” She was shaking him, and now more people were pausing, were turning this way, were looking at him.
Didn’t any of them understand? He’d done all he could! Why were they looking at him with such hate? What did they expect? For him to die along with them, and his family, too?
“I’m sorry!” he screamed in the woman’s face, shame and horror and panic all coming together into what felt like madness. And why not? The whole world was mad. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”
She was backing away now, but still he pursued her, screaming, crying, helpless and hating himself for it, until hard hands grasped him, and strong arms pulled him back. And still he yelled: “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m—”
“Sorry! All of you! And your descendants for generations!”
The voice that finished the sentence wasn’t Mircea’s; it changed as the scene did, dizzyingly fast, but not back to the quiet shadows of the hidden room. But to a night with a waxing moon shining through the bare branches of a winter forest, shedding little light onto a crowded hillside. But it wasn’t needed; a great ring of torches surrounded a scaffold at the top of the hill, where the largest tree of all stood in solitary splendor.
Like the woman from the castle, who was standing in the middle of the platform, her long dark hair streaming like a banner in the wind, the same one that sent ribbons of fire flowing out of the torches, and almost carried Mircea’s voice away.
“Even now,” he heard himself intone, “you cannot accept your guilt. Even now, you spit in the faces of those who would redeem you—”
“Redeem?” The woman’s scornful voice rang across the crowd. “Oh, pray forgive me, masters all. I thought you were here to kill me!”
“The body, lady, not the soul—”
“I’m a queen, not a lady! And I don’t give a damn about my soul!”
“Some truth from her at last,” someone muttered nearby.
“But we do,” Mircea said gravely. “And we choose to give you one last chance.”
He saw his arm rise—although it didn’t look like his, with darker skin and strange attire—and beckon a huge man forward. Only no, not a man. For he was shirtless, and his torso was strangely muscled, and his face . . .
Mircea suddenly stared around at the faces of the crowd, noticing what he’d been too panicked to see before. Because they were beautiful—beautiful but not right. Here was hair the color of bright green grass, there eyes like summer violets, and all of them too tall, too lithe, too . . .
Alien, he thought, and wanted to run, but his feet stayed planted on the scaffold.
“For your crimes, you are cast out,” he informed the woman, as the huge executioner tried to affix a blindfold over her eyes. “Separated forever from your home, your people, and your realm. May you find peace in your new world, and enrich it with your undoubted gifts—”
“I will make it tremble!” The woman twisted out of the guard’s hold, who had foolishly dropped his ax to tie the blindfold, and grabbed a knife from his belt. Before anyone could react, she’d sliced open his stomach, sending him stumbling back with his guts in his hands. “And then I’ll come after you!” She whirled on the crowd. “You puling cowards, you little fools, do you think you’ve heard the end of me?”
“Yes,” a deep voice boomed, and the next second, the beautiful, livid face was bouncing across the boards, along with the head it was attached to, coming to rest at Mircea’s feet.
He looked up, stunned, at a giant blond man with a sword in his hand and a spattering of blood across his face.
“Bury it!” the man snapped. “And may the gods have pity on this world!”
* * *
*
The vision, or whatever it was, snapped, ending as suddenly as it had begun. Mircea awoke to find the witch beating on him and screaming “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!” which wasn’t good; then he heard the sound of those running feet he’d been dreading, which was worse.
Merda!
He threw her off, but it didn’t help. She just grabbed him again, yelling for him to keep quiet and apparently not recognizing the irony. While he looked around for a weapon that might still work, because they were about to need one!
And found nothing that didn’t disintegrate under his hands.
So he grabbed the witch instead, and shook her. “What happened?”
“—screaming, and now they’ve probably heard us—”
“They have heard us! They’re on the way!”
The witch looked startled for a moment, like she hadn’t expected him to agree with her, then her face crumpled. “I knew it! I knew it, I knew it, I knew—”
Mircea shook her some more. “Answer me!”
“What difference does it make now?”
“Tell me!”
It was basically a roar, and finally snapped her out of her frenzy. “They—the fey—can weave memories into things, like paint or cloth. Letting you relive what one of them saw—”
The entire wall blew in, sending paneling flying, dust billowing, and a vampire in Medusa-head armor lunging for Mircea.
And then writhing on the floor, seemingly possessed, as he fought with a crowd of people long dead.
Mircea grabbed the witch out of the shelving she’d staggered into and towed her through the wall.
“W-what happened?” she demanded, looking back. “What did you do?”
“Threw the book at him,” Mircea said, and started out the door.
Only to crash into the secretary running in from the hall.
“That’s it! Look in his hand!” The witch pointed at something the secretary was clutching, as his startled eyes took in the two of them. Something glowing like a beacon, with a stronger, purer light than it had ever had before. The praetor’s shield!
Mircea lunged for it, and the next thing he knew, he was hitting the wall on the other side of the study. The secretary might look weak, and he wasn’t a master, or Mircea would be dead already. But he wasn’t a baby, either.