Her emotions were all tangled up with her arousal.

"Do you not know how to please yourself?" he asked, striving for gentleness in the question.

"Please myself?"

"Masturbari, Ceri." He spoke the Latin softly. "It will help."

She blushed, proving herself not completely innocent, which only made his body harder. What a pretty picture she would make: her hands, his mouth. His chest tightened with the thought of it.

"I do not want that," she said, jerking her arm free, her voice controlled but trembling. "I wanted you, and you are killing me."

"Then we will die together." He gave her what he could, knowing it was not enough for either of them.

"Bastard," she accused him. "Heartless, heartless bastard."

She gathered her skirts and fled, her slippered feet making nary a sound on the tower stairs. He watched her disappear and heard the door to his solar slam shut with the weight of her anger.

A mere fortnight past, he would have agreed with her, but the words were no longer true. He had a heart. He could tell by the damned stupid breaking of it.

Chapter 17.

Dawn had not yet broken the darkness of the night when Ceridwen heard Dain come down from the upper chamber. She had slept fitfully at best, and had known she slept only from the innumerable times she'd awakened. Each time she'd found Numa, her one true friend, loyally by her side.

She hated Wydehaw's mage. He was cruel beyond measure, rivaling the Boar, mayhaps surpassing him.

Caradoc only wanted her blood to make his wicked sacrifice and call up his fiendish dragons. With luck, the Boar could be eluded; and if she proved to have no luck, the beast could be faced and fought. But love, she didn't know how to fight love.

Dain had kissed her and taken her heart and filled it with more hurt than she could bear. Her pillow was damp with the tears she'd shed. 'Twas the pain of love squeezing the breath from her lungs in heavy sobs.

She didn't want to love him, yet she could find no escape. She'd searched her mind the night long, trying to find respite from the crushing emptiness he'd inflicted on her soul, and she'd found none. She loved the bastard Lavrans and had been forsaken.

Glass crashed somewhere in the room on the other side of the bed curtains. Dain swore, knocked into something, and swore again. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, holding herself still, listening.

Another crash followed the first, then came the scent of incense.

"Numa!" he hollered. "Elixir!Komi"

Belly to bedsheets, the albino slunk onto the floor and beneath the curtains without giving Ceridwen so much as a backward glance.

A torrent of Danish followed the hound's appearance in the chamber, a diatribe punctuated by heavy, erratically paced footfalls. Dain was crossing the room, his voice too loud for the space enclosed within the curved walls. The dogs began to whimper and whine, sounding so forlorn, their misery sent a shiver up her spine.

Fighting a cowardly impulse to hide, Ceridwen tossed the fur coverlets aside. No good could come from this madness. She would not allow him to hurt Numa in her stead. A loud banging thud brought her to a quick stop, the sheets gripped in her fist, the sable in a pile by her hip. She cocked her head and held her breath.

Could only have been his fist slamming into the Druid Door, she thought. Nothing else in the tower with the solidness of oak had the resonance of iron behind it.

"Nej!" he roared, hitting the door again and making her flinch. "Kvinde, nej!"

The command reverberated throughout the solar in a strange manner she could not comprehend, as if he spoke from two places at once, and within its dying echoes she heard a new sound-metal sliding and clacking against metal. There was an ominous timbre to the noise, reminding her of the scrape and glide of swordplay or of knives being sharpened. Her hands tightened on the sheets, and she found herselfpraying he would not come for her.

Dain locked the Druid Door down to the seventh level, shoving home bolts and half chanting, half cursing a litany of luminaries. He called each series of mechanisms by its planetary name, added its earthly counterpart and its element, and a curse torn from his frustration. From within the words he threw his voice to the dogs, bringing them to heel with a dire warning of what would come to pass if they failed in their task.

There was magic here, he swore to himself. He had not come this far only to be denied, not when the sacrifices had become so great. If he could not have Ceridwen, he would have the secrets of the Hart Tower. He would forge the marriage of Sol and Luna and conceive the hermaphroditic corpse from which resurrection became possible, the one spirit with mastery over the Philosopher's Stone. Pure gold could impregnate pure silver, the red stone into the white. The mix of the two, the hermaphrodite, had to die, the corpse in a tomb, and arise again with the blessing of the celestial influence.

"Sweet Jesus," he swore between his teeth. The way of it was written so even in the Bible:

Senseless man, that which thou sowest is not quickened unless it die first. And that which thou sowest, thou sowest not the body that shall be: but bare grain, as of wheat, or of some of the rest. But God giveth it a body as he will: and to every seed a proper body.

(I Cor. 15:36-8)

"God giveth it a body as he will." There is only one God, she'd said. He locked down Mercury with a hard twist of his hand and stepped back. Only one God to beseech, yet tonight he would beseech a pantheon of gods for the Quicken-tree, the very same who allowed him access to Nemeton's tower of cosmic mysteries to search for the transforming One. More swiving irony. He would die from it and be damned, if he could not understand it.

"Religion," he whispered as if the word were yet another curse. He reached out and touched the tips of his fingers to the Druid Door. He'd fought for his faith and been consigned to the depths of hell for his fervor. He'd murdered and slain in the name of his God, and his God had forsaken him.

And now this. He curled his fingers into his palm and turned his face toward the eastern window. 'Twas more than the maid eating away at him. The sun of Beltaine Eve had not yet risen into the sky and already he felt the pull of the grove, felt Deri calling to him. There were seven other festivals of the year, but 'twas Calan Gaef with the magic of death and Beltaine with the magic of blossom that affected him most, this year to his detriment. The whole of it was coming upon him too strongly, the quickening of the earth and his blood, the ripeness of the season and his loins. The Quicken-tree would get more than they had bargained for this night.

He turned away from the door, looking once more toward the eastern window. A dawn wind breached the embrasures, its touch falling lightly upon his cheeks. 'Twould not be long before the horizon ran red with the first streak of day, and there was more work to be done. Yet he took the moment, lifting his face into the fading darkness of the night and letting the wind caress his lips with a sweet kiss from the coming morn.

Ceridwen listened to the silence, and her courage grew. Assuring herself that Dain would not kill her outright, she crept to the side of the bed and opened the curtains a bare slit.

All was quiet. Dain stood in the middle of the solar with a soft wind ruffling the sleeves and hem of his tunic. His hair was wild about him, long and tangled, proof of hands that had run through it over and over again in distraction-or despair. One torch burned bright in a cresset next to the hearth, its flame rippling in the breeze, its light glancing off the heavy, bronze-studded leather belt around Dain's waist.

The gentling wind died down, and the chaos returned. Dain began pacing the breadth of the chamber, his strides uneven, roaming to some unseen will, until a destination seemed to present itself and he was once more on a true course.

"Kvinde, nej!" His hand came down hard on the door leading to the eyrie. The dogs wound themselves around his legs in abject subjugation, sleek white flowing against pitch-black, the two twining bodies lit by flickering torchlight. He issued his command again at each of the embrasures, then one final time over the hatch leading to the alchemy chamber. His voice shifted strangely, from here to there, even when he stayed in one place, making her uneasy, but the dogs responded without hesitation, following him step by step, fawning and cajoling, all but licking his boots in their eagerness to please.

With a sinking heart, she realized he had spoken true. She should not have put her trust where in the end it must be betrayed; the bitch was his. Totally. There was but one master in the Hart Tower.

From the hatch, he moved to the rows of shelves holding his simples and chose a small earthenware vessel. When he turned to the table, she got her first clear look at his face and drew back with an emotion she could not name, though the force of it raced through her. The chaos of his movements had invaded every aspect of his being. His eyes were fiercely intense, his breath coming short, the very bones of his face etched more strongly beneath his skin. With one broad sweep of his hand, he cleared the table of its contents, sending ampoules, pots, and cruets crashing onto the floor, their once fine forms reduced to thousands of shards and potsherds. Naught was left but the small brazier releasing fragrant fume-terres, the smoke of the earth.

Releasing a ragged moan, he dropped into his great chair, covering his face with one hand while he clutched the small pot within the other. For long moments, the only sound filling the air between them was his breath.

"I know you are awake," he said at last, his voice dark with an edge of bitterness. "I can feel you watching me." She blanched and drew back deeper into the bed. "Hear this, Ceridwen ab Arawn. You will not leave this chamber until dawn breaks the sky again. If you try, the hounds will restrain you, doing whatever they must. Do not count on Numa's loyalty to aid in your escape, for the bitch would as soon tear you limb from limb than go against my will in this."

There was both threat and warning in his words, and the revelation of what he'd done with all his shouting and hitting of doors: He'd sealed the tower. Panic fluttered to life in her breast. She would not be trapped like the animal he had become, awaiting the return of Caradoc and damnation. The time for leaving was upon her.

"I gave my word that I would not try to escape," she said, fighting to control her alarm and bringing all her guile to bear on the falsely spoken promise in hopes of making it appear genuine. "And your word will be broken," he said with utter conviction.

"I have not yet strayed," she reminded him. "And I have had the chance."

Slowly, he lifted his head, staring through the darkness and the distance with eyes so bright, she trembled. He looked more beast than the Boar. "Your thoughts of love held you here, and I have taken them away. You will try your escape now, but I am warning you: Do not attempt to leave this tower before another full turn of the sun. The hills will be aflame tonight with the fires of Bel, and you will be consumed. I promise you this."

Her face went from the paleness of fear to the red flush of anger. Love? How dare he speak to her of love.

"You have overvalued yourself." She would not be made a fool of twice, no matter how badly he frightened her.

"No,kaereste," he said, his gaze unwavering. " 'Tis that I undervalued you. I thought I could not be touched. You have proven me wrong."

If the words had been spoken in any tone other than that of desolation, she might have taken hope, but he had left her none. He sat alone at his table, his form unyielding, his bearing grim, leaving no room for another at his side.

In silence, he broke the seal on the clay pot, then dipped in the middlemost finger of his left hand and pulled it back out. 'Twas covered with a black unguent. Starting on the left side of his face, he put his finger beneath his eye and drew a thick line straight out across his temple to his hairline. With his right middle finger, he did the same to the other eye. The dark potion glittered in the light of fire and candle like a streak of the night sky across his tawny skin.

This was not the banding of the Quicken-tree, Ceridwen thought. It was something else, something much less fair, something baleful.

"What are you doing?" She pulled the curtains aside and slipped to the floor in her bare feet, curiosity overcoming caution. "What is this unguent you use?"

He did not answer, only dipped in his finger again and drew a second line from his right ear across his cheekbone and up and over the bridge of his nose.

She approached him carefully, not knowing how close she dared to get.

"Your courage is ill-placed in this," he told her, and she wondered if she'd ever managed to hide anything from him, or if he'd been reading her mind from the first night.

"So what say you?" She kept her voice soft. "Am I in danger?" She was duly afraid, but strangely and suddenly, far more for him than herself. For herself, she was wary, and curious, so curious.

"Not if you stay in the tower with the hounds to guard you." He finished the line by drawing it across his left cheekbone to his left ear.

"Will you be staying also?" "No. I go to Rhuddlan's camp." A new line was started below the last, the three of them thick and rich.

She stopped at the table's edge, well away from the broken glass and him. "And what will become of you in Deri?"

A short, harsh laugh answered her question. "The becoming has already begun,cherie," he said, trailing the third line across the width of his face with unerring accuracy.

"And is this what you become? This striped, wild thing?" She made a small gesture of helplessness, not understanding what she saw in his face. Something stranger than the alchemical magic they practiced in the lower chamber was happening to him. The shadows, the low uneven light, and the pattern he was painting on his face were conspiring to disguise him. Verily, he seemed to be disappearing before her eyes.

"Wild?" With the reverence of ritual, he touched each of his fingers to the pot in turn, smearing their tips with unguent. "Aye, 'tis something wild I become, wild and fearsome."

He looked down at his hands and slowly turned his palms toward the ceiling. The air stirred, setting the candle flame aflicker and causing the incense smoke to curl around and down upon itself, then rise up again in a winding trail. He lifted his arms, his fingers curved like unsheathed talons, his palms cupped, as if he were pulling something up from the air in front of him.

Ceridwen held herself close, her own hands clasped at her breasts, resisting the need to reach out to him and stop him. In her ignorance, she did nothing, and when his gaze flashed to hers-brightly crazed with an unholy light--she knew 'twas too late. He had gone beyond her.

"You see before you the Demon." The words rolled off his tongue encased in smoke, terrifying her with their proclamation: Evil was here. Smoke flowed from between his teeth and out of his nostrils, circling up in fumed whorls to shield his face and curl through tendrils of his hair. He closed his eyes on a breath of uncanny length and power, a deep inhalation of the fragrant grayish-blue haze that filled his chest and pulled a stillness down around them both.

She dared not touch him now. Indeed, she took a step back. He had shown her nothing like this before.

'Twas wondrous, monstrous, dizzily frightening stuff. The heaviest of magic, she was sure, good for the most deadly spell-casting and conjuring.

"What need has Rhuddlan of a demon?" she asked, compelled to the rash question by her own needs.

Mayhaps, when the time came, if she had the courage, she could transform herself into one. Heresy in its most despicable form, but what choice did she have? Nothing less than what she saw before her would dissuade the Boar from his wedding bed or frighten him from his damnable course, but that it would do so she had no doubt. Here was a feral being unheedful of the laws of man or God, a demon true, bound only by his own evil intent.

Jesu. Was this how all sinners came into being, forced by circumstance into dealings with a dark manifestation? Falling from grace while clinging to that most divine state?

The barest smile curved the Demon Dain's mouth. Wisps of vapor curled at the corners of his lips and veiled the red-rimmed eyes staring at her from deep in their sockets. "You are fearless, Ceri."

She could have called him liar, despite his gift of sight, for her heart was racing. Yet her only concession to fear was another judicious step back. "Retreat?" he asked with a mocking lift of one brow.

"Caution only," she replied, though her voice was breathless with fright.

"Then listen, little cautious one." He smiled, and his lashes lowered over his fiery gaze. "Rhuddlan calls up the Sacred Demon of the unknown for his own use, the Demon of despair, for Rhuddlan is as fearless as you." He spoke the words as liturgy, lifting his hands and laying the tips of his fingers upon his cheeks.

"Rhuddlan of the Quicken-tree welcomes the true Demon of suffering and sorrow, the one who steals the first sweet breaths of children, the one who cripples and maims youth and the old with no regard to justice, the one who steals souls." With the solemnity of a priest, he dragged his fingers across his face, making four lines on either side to add to the three.

"Rhuddlan beseeches the bane of mankind and all beings, the hand of God in destruction. The Demon enters the forest at dawn, the bringer of all divine disasters: the earth cracking open, rivers swelling over their banks and washing the land clean, fires spewing forth from the mountain-tops, giant winds swirling down from the sky. The Demon beckons, and the four elements do the Demon's bidding. Earth. Water.

Fire. Air.I am the Demon," he said, and his voice echoed upon itself in eldritch tones both eerie and profane.

Aye, she thought, taking in every word and committing it to memory. Here was power to be used, dark power to be feared by all.

"And when the destruction has been wrought, Rhuddlan and all of Quicken-tree will take the Demon and transform him into the Underworld god they need, the god he was before Rome turned him into the Devil." His voice wove a continuing spell of enchantment with its undulating charm, revealing the mystery of what he had become. "Ceraunnos, the Horned One, Lord of the Animals, will come to them on Beltaine as he has for time beyond memory, and there amidst the fires, he will meet Beli, father of the gods and god of the Sun, and Don, Mother Goddess of the Earth and the gods, and of all heroes."

Ceridwen knew the god Ceraunnos, as well as she knew Beli and Don. She'd come across them many times in the manuscripts kept in the library at Usk. Their names ran through the old stories told by her mother. They were worshiped by the Druids, and they consorted with the Light-elves from across the water. Aye, she knew Ceraunnos, for he was spoken of in the red book and she'd seen him once, somewhere, etched into stone with his tore in one hand and a horned serpent in the other, with other serpents by his side, a deity of fertility crowned with a stag's antlers-or so the pagan manuscripts said.

Now she faced the mix of god and demon in its flesh, and she understood the being no better than she had before. God was God. Devil was Devil. One was to be loved, the other abhorred. The lines were clear, the two could not meet, and certainly not within the form of one mere mortal.

"No man can be both god and demon," she told him.

Dain's eyes slowly opened, and a subtly demonic smile lifted a corner of his mouth. " Au contraire,cherie . No man can help but be both. Until the ceremony, and even after, you will not be safe in Wroneu. Any man who catches you in the forest on May Eve will take what I have not."

He pushed himself out of his chair, rising with a horrible swiftness, and she stumbled back in unabashed retreat. His eyebrow arched, but he took no more heed, passing by her without comment on his way to the hearth. With all his sorcerer's grace, he swung his cloak around his shoulders and lifted the cowl over his head.

She saw nothing more of his face. If not truly demon and god, he had become what he'd been the first time she'd seen him: a shadow lost in darkness.

"Remember what I have said, and beware the dogs," he warned, striding toward the floor hatch. "They will not let you pass where I have told them you may not go-"

Ceridwen watched him descend the alchemy chamber stairs, pulling the hatch closed behind him. Within moments the bolt slid home on the underside of the planks, and she knew her fate had been sealed as surely as the tower.

Yet there was the faintest glimmer of hope, for he had left the black unguent. 'Twould not be a pale, trembling virgin Caradoc found when next he breached the walls of Wydehaw.

Shay saw Lavrans first, far below him on the forest floor. The mage moved with the silent speed of the tylwyth teg, his footsteps leaving no more trace nor making any more sound than the dawn wind soughing through the trees and billowing his cloak behind him like dark wings on a bird of prey.

The Quicken-tree youth marked Dain's direction, then signaled Llynya where she sat on a bough below him, doing her best to entice a sunbeam into warming the small purple-and-white violet in the palm of her hand. She was very near success. Shay could see the tiny ray of light moving along the field maple bough, both advancing and retreating, but growing ever closer to Llynya's outstretched fingers. The flower still had the freshness of morning dew on it. Night nectar, the Quicken-tree were apt to call the moisture, for 'twas the cooling of the night that lured the water out of the air, and morning light that made it disappear.

He would have let her continue, for there was nothing quite like sunbeam-warmed violets to break one's fast, but Lavrans was slipping deeper into the shadows of Wroneu. Shay tried to signal her again with a gesture, and when that failed to attract her attention, he cupped his hand around his mouth and gave the clearchir-r-upcall of a lark.

Her immediate reaction was not to look up at him, but to peek down over the side of her bough and, like himself, mark Dain's direction. The flower went in her mouth to be eaten cold.

"Malashm," she said, lapsing into an Elfin tongue. "Donn Thanieu esa lofar Deri."