Her Master's Hand Read online

  She listened to Hoel putting the bottles away and washing his hands. She was only in the corner about five minutes, and then Hoel knelt behind her and told her to turn around.

  As soon as she did, he began to wash the tears off her face with a washcloth. “What am I going to do with you?” he sighed. “I only want your happiness. Why can’t you trust me to know what’s best? You know I love you like you’re my own, but you’re set to break our hearts.”

  “And you’re set on breaking mine,” she croaked, her throat tight and her eyes still full of tears. “I didn’t ask for any of this.”

  Hoel frowned and then kissed her forehead and picked her up. “You have to understand how young you are to us. You’re just a little thing still, and you don’t know anything,” he said, apparently trying to soothe her. “One day you’ll look back on this and understand why we push you so hard.”

  She understood now; they viewed her somewhere between a cantankerous child and a puppy who they were trying to train not to bite the hand that fed it.

  He opened the door and then held her close to him as he pulled down the blankets on her bed and gently put her down in it. He sat her on the edge and pulled off her slippers. “Tomorrow, if you’re looking better, perhaps you and I can stay in and you can read me a book? Maybe a game of chess or two?” he said, seeming unsettled by the way she was still so unhappy with him.

  She slunk underneath the covers, cursing on how she could feel every piece of fabric of her nightdress scrape across her swollen bottom. “Goodnight, papa.”

  He brushed his large fingers through her hair in an adoring pat before he turned her lantern down low. “Goodnight, little one.”

  She listened to his heavy boot falls walk out of the room, and then the door closed behind him. She listened to Anwen say, “I hate that she’s making this whole marriage matter so hard. Doesn’t she know it’s hard enough on us letting her go?”

  “It’s alright, love. She’ll come around,” Hoel replied softly down the hall. “And then, you and I will just make do with each other.”

  She felt her heart clench. She knew that they were lonely, and according to the selkies, Hoel and Anwen fought like cats and dogs until they took in Maili. They both had a common interest, then. She sighed, but the tang of guilt she expected to settle in her never came. Even if Damen was everything that they thought he was, Damen still would have been taking Maili into the middle of the desert, a week’s journey away from both of them. Then, they’d be lonely once again.

  She had to leave, she had to defy them once more, and she had to start tonight.

  Chapter Eleven

  Maili always had problems being quiet. Hoel used to complain about it—it seemed like she was always talking too loudly, humming too loudly, walking too loudly, or even writing too loudly. Those complaints had always been quite meaningless to her until she was in the processes of sneaking out. It was then she fully conceived of her disability. She did walk too loudly, and she also turned doorknobs much like she’d imagine an elephant would.

  It was also impossibly dark on top of everything else. She was bumping into everything, nearly broke two vases before she even hit the stairway in the hall, and then she startled when she heard Hoel’s voice from his bedroom and nearly fell down a whole flight of stairs.

  No less than seven bottles were dropped as she looked for the proper elixirs, and she found herself praising the gods that none of them shattered or tumbled all the way to the floor. Finally, she realized the study’s oak door toward the gardens was impossibly squeaky. Opening it more slowly seemed to make the squeaking even more audible than usual.

  It was a miracle she got outside without waking the whole house.

  She walked through the short maze of shrubs before the yard opened to the sea, where she could see familiar selkies drinking large bottles of rum and laughing. She sighed with relief and picked up the pace, slip-sliding down the sandy hill toward the beach.

  “Darleen’s got the biggest tits I ever saw in my life!” roared one of the bawdier bull selkies. Apparently she hadn’t been seen yet because she was certain that they wouldn’t have talked like that in front of her. “She could feed seven pups on those at a time, I’m guessing.”

  “Guess I’ll have to find out…” another laughed.

  “Ha! If you take another wife, your first three will have your tail!”

  “Personally, I don’t need more than a handful of breasts. Now, the rump on the other hand…”

  “Pierce, you’ve always been obsessed with rumps…”

  Maili pressed her lips together thoughtfully, pausing near the edge of the bay behind a boulder. How she could come into this conversation without creating more than a surplus of awkwardness was beyond her reckoning.

  Besides, was this really all men talked about as soon as women were out of earshot? What a disappointing notion…

  “Pierce.” She flipped her slippers off her feet and stepped into the sea where the three bull selkies, probably well over a thousand pounds of solid muscle between them, stretched their massive bodies over the cool rocks in the moonlight. Three heads whipped in her direction, mouths dropped open. “I need your help.”

  Pierce was a skinny boy when she’d first met him. He had been in the bay her first summer, before the palace had been built. Now he was nearing his mid-thirties, had two wives, eight pups, and was an elder in his tribe. Tattoos and tribal scars scrawled down most of the skin on either arm. If she hadn’t seen it herself, she would have never suspected he had ever been an anxious teenager.

  Yet he was still her oldest friend, so he straightened and his face got serious. “What’s wrong, then? And what are you doing out at this hour? You’ll catch your death—there’s a storm coming on!”

  “I need you to do something for me—no questions asked,” she told him, shaking her head solemnly. She could tell his expression had become worried, but she knew he wouldn’t back down. Pierce would probably drown someone and cart their body away, no questions asked. That was simply the type of friend that he was. After nearly twenty years, she felt that their friendship was pretty solid.

  Pierce finally sighed, “Yes?”

  “I need you to remove this,” she said, pulling her arm out of her nightgown even as she was saying it. When the golden cuff was glistening in the moonlight, she gestured to it.

  Pierce had seen it before, though he didn’t know what it was. “I can no more easily remove that than I could one of my piercings,” he said with a snort, gesturing to his left nipple.

  “Exactly why I need your help… And probably theirs, too, to hold me down when you do it.” She gestured to Moole and Darey, who were transfixed on the conversation and sat still on Pierce’s left- and right-hand side. At the mention of themselves, they straightened, looking extremely uneasy for a couple of big brutes that could probably take on a shark with their bare hands if they wanted to.

  Pierce gave a laugh, and when she tilted her head with confusion, his smile disappeared. “Dear Gods, you’re serious. You’re serious?” Pierce was completely incredulous. He furrowed his brow and glanced at her arm. He reached out and she walked toward him a few feet until he could grasp his hand around her arm. He ran his thumb over it, assessed it, and dropped it. “Do you have any idea how much that would hurt? You have to cut in the flesh to get that off!”

  “I don’t care. I won’t scream. I take this, and I won’t make a sound for two hours.” She held up a bottle of elixir. “You don’t have to worry about Hoel hearing what’s going on.”

  “That wasn’t my main concern,” he assured flatly, looking very unimpressed by the elixir in her hand. “Hell, that was so far away from my main concern, I hadn’t even thought of Hoel until now—he’d kill me if he saw that I cut something out of you. Not just kill me, but kill me a lot.”

  “Pierce, I need it off. My survival depends on this,” she said, letting her desperation seep into her tone, “please. Take off the whole arm if you have to. I’m an immort
al. It will grow back.” At least she was quite sure that it would.

  His lips puckered. “If you don’t bleed to death first!” he argued. “Not to mention that, for an immortal, you really are bloody terrible at healing yourself. You get sick more often than I do!”

  She felt out of breath, suddenly fretful. She needed to win this argument. She needed the cuff off, and she couldn’t do it herself. “Pierce, it doesn’t matter. If I don’t have it off, I’ll die for certain. Believe me.”

  He eyed her suspiciously for a moment, but eventually his muscular shoulders relaxed. “What do you mean?”

  She shook her head. She couldn’t tell him that she was a witch now—it would surely frighten a selkie out of his mind. Nobody would look at her the same again. “No questions asked, Pierce. This isn’t something I’m asking lightly, but I do need it done, and I need it done tonight.”

  He looked like he had swallowed something sour. “This is insane.”

  “I know it is,” she admitted, hunching her shoulders. “But it’s what must be done.”

  He suddenly reached out and grabbed her, pulling her up to the boulder he and his friends were perched on, causing her to squeak with surprise. She was always forgetting how damn strong these creatures could be. A bull selkie like Pierce could probably snap her in two if he’d wanted.

  “I’m not exactly a surgeon, you know,” Pierce warned her.

  “That’s quite an understatement. The man might as well have crab-hands,” grumbled Moole.

  “So you do it!” Pierce snapped in reply.

  Moole was quick to put up his hands defensively. “I’m not going to get on Hoel’s bad side by mutilating his daughter. Not for a million pearls!”

  Pierce grumbled and grabbed at his knife that he kept on his belt. “Take the elixir, Maili. You two—don’t go anywhere,” he demanded when Moole and Darey were slowly beginning to slide from the boulder and into the dark sea. “I’ll do it. You hold her down.”

  “Don’t do it with your knife,” she suggested, reaching into her bag and pulling out a belt and a clean knife. “Yours has fish guts all over it.” She passed him the blade and then pulled the belt through the clasp until it made a circle, then she slid her arm in it. She moved it up her arm.

  “What’re you doin’, then?” Darey said in his low, rumbling voice that never sounded very intelligent to her ears.

  “Tourniquet,” she replied. When she looked up, Darey looked confused and she added, “Keeps me from bleeding too much.”

  “Ah.” He stuck out his fat bottom lip and nodded as if he understood and agreed with her plan. “Why ain’t you got some painkiller ‘stead of a silent potion? Hoel has some, don’t he?”

  “Tons of it!” she assured, but then promptly frowned. “But that’s valuable enough that he keeps it under lock and key. I couldn’t risk sneaking into his bedroom to get those keys, either—no way would I get away with that.”

  She squeezed the bottle of silence elixir between her fingers. She found Pierce’s gaze and held it. “Promise that no matter what happens, you don’t stop until it’s done, okay?”

  He pursed his lips and nodded. “Promise you won’t die on me.”

  “I won’t die on you,” she told him easily. She looked over her shoulder, where Moole was positioning himself behind her. “When he’s done, I have bandages in that purse,” she told him.

  Moole nodded, but then he began petting his hand down her hair soothingly. “Alright, two-legs. No more chattin’ or else Pierce is gonna lose his nerve. Take your medicine there, and don’t make another peep. When it’s done, it’s done, eh?”

  Moole’s concerned tone actually confused her at first, but just before she took a swig of elixir, she began to slightly panic. What she was doing and asking, she realized, was extreme. It was going to hurt—a lot. It was going to make any punishment she had ever gotten before look like a walk in the park.

  It wasn’t as if she had a choice—she didn’t, but the violence of her current reality wasn’t lost on her.

  She took the bitter potion and Moole and Darey moved her down until her whole body was flat against the stone. She looked up at Pierce, whose eyes glinted in the low light. She could see that his expression was less than excited.

  She tested the potion, trying to speak to him, but her throat was numb, her voice not even a scratch or a whimper. There was no sound at all. She swallowed and nodded to Pierce.

  Pierce leaned over her, cut the extra slack of belt off her arm, and then put it in her mouth. “Bite down on this,” he told her gruffly. “Remember your promise. No dying.”

  She gave a nod, as if she could help it. If she died, she died. Hoel couldn’t possibly trace her actions to Pierce. Pierce could surely just dispose of her body in the sea and that would be that. The tide would wash away the evidence.

  Now, that’s a somber thought, she thought to herself wryly. When she met up with Ashcroft again she was going to give him a lot of hell for putting her through all this, she decided.

  Of course, she stopped deciding exactly what sort of hell she’d give him as soon as the knife cut into her. She stopped thinking entirely; her mind decided to give her body the reins.

  She found herself struggling against everything—the knife, the two goons who held her down, the pain slicing into her arm. She couldn’t even remember that not ten minutes ago, she was a breath away from begging for all of this!

  She had stumbled into a real-life nightmare, complete with helplessness in total and the inability to even scream for help. Only distantly, through her haze of panic, could she even realize that Piece was sweating, struggling, looking sickly pale and worried. He could cut her skin, apparently, but cutting her enchanted cuff away was muscle work even for a hulking creature like himself.

  “I got it. I got a piece off,” Pierce gritted.

  Just a piece? She didn’t know if she should continue to panic, or be relieved! Before anything except the desire to fight off her ‘helpers’ hit her mind, however, the world around her fell into darkness.

  Chapter Twelve

  “Charlotte—what is this? The master is going to kill you.” Chocolate brown eyes came into Maili’s focus. They were owned by a strikingly handsome, yet overly groomed gentleman with a scraped chin and knee-high boots over his perfectly tailored trousers. “He told you not to try making your own potions, didn’t he? You’re ridiculously stupid. You’re like a dog who can’t be house trained—”

  “Err! It burns!” Maili gritted. “My arm’s gonna fall off! Hurry and find something!”

  Apparently not liking to be ordered about, the man put his hands on his hips and stood back to huff, “What do I look like? I’m not a witch!” before he swooped down and suddenly picked her up into his arms. He wasn’t extremely tall, maybe six-foot, but he was rock-solid and moved like a cat, with every movement graceful as a dancer’s.

  “Don’t bring me up to Ashcroft, Moriarty!” she whimpered to him. Maili distantly was startled that she knew this man’s name. “Just please, please just go get the elixir I need!”

  “My sweet girl, I hear you,” he said, and she thought he was speaking to her with compassion until he added, “You don’t want the paddling you so sorely need. I understand completely!” Apparently, understanding didn’t really sound like he had any sympathy at all in the matter. “But one thing I will not do is to hesitate on the proper course of action when your arm is turning purple.”

  She looked down and gasped because, and she hadn’t realized this before, but her arm was indeed turning purple. Not a sickly purple, either, but the color a cartoon elephant might be.

  And it was now beginning to turn black… A spanking, after all was said and done, no longer seemed so overly intimidating.

  She blew some of her coppery hair out of her eyes—not black hair, just a dull reddish-brown. “Okay…” she conceded unhappily. “Hurry…”

  Of course, Maili had no idea what was really going on, but she felt like that she should know
, or did have more of a handle on things in this dream. Maili wasn’t confused, just curious as to what was going to happen next. Would this pain—and the pain seemed quite real—ever go away?

  She was carried up a labyrinth of stairs and hallways until she was crying with misery. The more she cried, the tighter the man would hold her. Before she knew it, Moriarty was practically kicking down the door to a giant, multi-level room with thousands of books lining the walls except for huge windows that filtered in the daylight from outside.

  “What?” came an annoyed huff, and Ashcroft himself came into view, his expression dark and serious as he stood up from a gigantic wing-backed chair near the fireplace. He looked like he had it in mind to bite someone’s head off, but his face immediately melted into one full of concern and even panic. “Charlotte! What’s happened here?” He approached her and immediately began to look at her inflamed arm, which was beginning to crack and bleed, now, becoming quite a nasty sight.

  By now, Maili was sobbing in the stranger’s arms.

  “I’m afraid she’s gone and had a lab accident again,” the stranger sighed, speaking for her.

  Ashcroft suddenly looked tired and weary, as if this had happened too many times already. “Bring her over to the chair, and find my scissors in my desk. We have to cut off her sleeve,” he told his handsome servant, and Maili was carried to the chair, put down, and left alone until Moriarty came back and carefully began to cut away her sleeve.

  “Charlotte, I’ve told you over and over that making elixirs is too dangerous to do outside of the classroom! Besides, you need your powers for your lessons, not to be used up in all of this!” Ashcroft scolded, suddenly returning to her side and getting on his knees in front of her. He grumbled as he opened up what looked like a little black doctor’s bag and then looked up at her injury yet again. “Did it turn blue first?”

  “It turned purple,” Moriarty was quick to say as he trimmed her sleeve from her elbow to her shoulder. He grumbled unhappily, “Look at this. Ruining this fabric; you know it’s got gold thread in it. Cost a fortune…”