Read Online To the High Redoubt by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro - Free Book Online Page B

the wound would become infected. That was the way with wounds.
    â€œDown down down,” she insisted, pressing him back against the blanket and starting to unfasten his leather doublet.
    â€œSurata, for the Saints in Heaven—” He tried to get her to stop, for he was now really distressed. It was bad enough that she knew he was hurt, but to discover the rest would shame him. He started to push her away, swearing to himself, when her hands touched his forehead.
    â€œArkady-immai,” she said in a still voice. “Down.”
    Slowly he lay back with the languor of a dreamer. “Right,” he murmured as his resistance faded and his body surrendered to the drag of fatigue. He was vaguely aware that he was not acting at all properly, but he did not care. The way her hands moved on his face and neck was more soothing than victory and wine. Even when she began to remove his clothes, he did little to stop her. There was too much—what? he asked himself: sweetness? pleasure? lassitude?—in him to stop her. Under her ministrations, he drifted, his mind roving back through his memories.
    He had been so little that he could not see over the top of the table. He remembered peering at the rushes beneath, seeing the vermin there. At first they had fascinated him, but when he tried to get closer, a mouse had turned on him and sunk tiny teeth into his thumb. He had gone wailing to his mother who had bandaged the thumb but laughed at him. The humiliation of her derision still stung him, though she had been dead for seven years .
    â€œArkady-immai,” Surata whispered as she pressed her palms to the place where his ribs joined, “do not hold back what is there. Release it to me.”
    There had been that big brute of a sorrel in his father’s stable, and he had made a wager he could ride the horse, although most of the men avoided the beast. He had been able to stay on for a while, but he had been terrified the whole time, and when he was finally thrown, he had gone behind the stables to be sick .
    He writhed at what these recollections did to him, afraid that he would be beneath reproach to anyone who learned such dreadful things about him.
    â€œArkady-immai,” Surata urged him softly, “you must not be so distressed. There is no reason for it.”
    â€œDon’t,” he whimpered and was aghast at the sound of his own voice.
    â€œNo, no Arkady-immai, you have nothing to fear. I promise you, there is nothing to fear.” Her hands were sure and so comforting that he did not force them away again. She continued to touch him, her hands strong and certain, never hard, never hurting, offering a kind of solace he had not known before.
    A Turkish warrior, mouth open and foaming, eyes protruding, rushed toward him, scimitar up and ready to strike off his head. Arkady blocked the blow with his sword, but the sword had shattered. One of his soldiers, a boy of no more than fourteen who spent his evenings singing hymns, had got between them and had been killed .
    Arkady’s eyes were wet and his hands could not stop shaking.
    A woman with a brash sort of beauty strolled through the camp, offering to take on the soldiers for a price and a challenge. The Margrave Fadey had been horrified, afraid of pox and Turkish spies, and had ordered Arkady to drive her from the camp. She had taunted him in front of his men, and once outside the camp had tried to attack him with a knife. He had fought with her—the scar on his eyebrow was a token of that encounter—and had left her unconscious. The next day she was found hanging, gutted, from the Turkish fortifications .
    â€œDo not hide these things, Arkady-immai. I will not hate you or rebuke you or turn away from you, my vow on it.”
    He saw Mira’s face the day she told him that she was pregnant. He had listened to her in silence, then tried to make her believe that it did not matter to him, that he did not care, he would