Her Master's Hand Read online

Why anyone would want to trap a cyrannos in the first place was beyond her imagining. They were very large snakes with nearly human-like intelligence. They weren’t exactly the stuff of nightmares, but that was just because their hearing was poor and their sight was even worse. They hissed a lot, too, so they were easy enough to avoid, and they didn’t go after humans. They went after bunnies, pheasants, and weasels, and rarely anything bigger than one’s forearm.

  “And why in the name of the Otherworld would you even try to capture a cyrannos, you big oaf? They’re harmless!”

  “They don’t go after humans, but they’re not harmless, I assure you,” he told her, and she finally felt the net beginning to lower. She craned her neck to see him next to the nearest tree, where he pulled a rope out of a knot and slowly began to lower her net to the ground. “Not to mention that their venom is extremely valuable in some markets. Not that it matters now, since all I got was a girl on a nature hike. What are you doing so far from the village, may I ask?”

  “You may not ask. You may continue to lower me, and then leave me alone,” she told him snippily. He wasn’t exactly being apologetic. In fact, she felt that he expected an apology out of her for him having captured her after trapping her in a tree for the last two hours.

  “You’re lucky I came around. I wasn’t going to check this net until tomorrow,” he told her. “But then I had one of those nagging feelings, like a brat might be trapped in there, and so I made a special round.”

  “Can’t you get me down a little faster?” she demanded peevishly, wondering how she could still possibly be descending.

  “Yeah,” he replied, and then dropped her the last five feet.

  She gave a ‘Gaah!’ of annoyance when she landed in a netted heap on the leafy ground. After a beating the night before and then stumbling through the woods all evening, she was really bruised enough without having to now deal with a trapper’s insolence as well. She scrambled to unhook herself from the net, but the trapper himself had to cut her loose from the top of the net’s closing with a knife of his own.

  “Stay still,” he lectured her. “I don’t want to cut you.”

  “No, you just want to break my arm!”

  “You broke your arm?” he asked, looking through the netting, a confused yet surprisingly concerned look breaking through his scarred features.

  “No,” she replied, “but anything could have broken my fall, you know.”

  The concern and confusion vanished instantly and he snorted derisively. “Five feet is barely a drop at all. Grow thicker skin,” he retorted, slicing the netting.

  Her cheeks heated, and he pulled the netting off of her. She got to her knees, held her dress to the front of her, and then quickly grabbed up her satchel.

  “Ah,” he said, glancing at her. “You’re in the middle of running away.” He put his knife away, fitting it into a small scabbard on his leather belt. “Bah! Women. They think they can run away from any and all of their problems toward some sort of proverbial heaven-like paradise that’s just waiting to take them in. So which problem are we running from today? Running from a father set to take a switch to your hide? Perhaps to escape a marriage arrangement? How old are you?”

  That was absolutely enough. She couldn’t stand this man talking to her any longer. Why he was hovering over her was a mystery; she just wanted him gone. She didn’t like his looks, how tall he was, or how he seemed to exude arrogance as if it were heady cologne.

  She turned, and he raised his eyebrows, as if he expected her to actually answer him. Instead, she slapped him in the face. He stepped back, looking nearly startled, as if he actually couldn’t have seen that coming, but his body stilled, his mouth opened, and he slowly moved his hand up to his cheek.

  She raised her chin and walked off to find a bush large enough to hide at least most of her body so that she could begin tugging her dress on. There was still a part of her—a larger part than she would have liked—that was mortified at having paraded in front of a man in her underthings, even if that man was obviously not worth the bothering.

  Trying not to bother with his huffy reaction to being slapped—which was completely deserved from being snooty and nosy all at once; she knew that she wouldn’t have had the nerve to poke fun at him if she had locked him in a net—she put her shoes on before stepping into her skirts and then began to slip her arms through the sleeves.

  She didn’t notice how close he had gotten to her until his arm snapped forward and he grabbed her by the elbow, trapping her in his steely grasp. She gasped and tried to tug away, but her look of fear was lost on him. He was looking at the cuff on her upper arm, which was exposed now that it wasn’t covered by a sleeve. “Let me go!” she screamed, even hurting her own ears.

  “Shut up,” he demanded, and none-too-softly. After he turned her arm left and right, he finally looked up into her eyes. “You’re a witch?”

  It suddenly felt like ice was lodged in her throat, choking her. She sputtered, terrified. How could a trapper know what she was so quickly?

  Unless, of course, he wasn’t a trapper…

  Her blood ran cold as she remembered the unbreakable rope… it had been enchanted.

  She tried to jerk her arm away, using all her strength, but he didn’t seem fazed at all by her display of power. He didn’t even seem like he was straining a muscle to keep her in his hand.

  His eyes were planted right onto hers, not breaking away. “What sort of witch are you?” he demanded. He gave her arm a shake, nearly making her trip. “Tell me.”

  “I don’t know! Let me go!” She was certain she wouldn’t be any more terrified if it was Damen himself who had caught her out in the woods. “What are you?” she asked, panting from horror.

  “Ashcroft of Medwin, master of the Northlands realm, master archivist,” he straightened, as if there was something in his obnoxiously long name that she should have been impressed by.

  Honestly, the name sounded familiar, as if she’d heard it spoken before. Hoel must have mentioned him at one time or another, but for the life of her she couldn’t remember what it had been regarding, or even when she had heard the name. Possibly it had been a very long time ago. It still didn’t mean anything to her. Her eyes shifted from side to side, trying to remember.

  Slouching slightly, he asked with an exasperated sigh, “You don’t know who I am, do you?”

  She shook her head, still panicked. Half his face looked even more fearsome and gruesome.

  “I’m a wizard,” he finally confirmed, and then held on extra tight when she tried to get out of his hold again. “Can you please not act like I just told you I’m the bogey man? It isn’t as if you’re not of my kind, for lord’s sake.”

  She swallowed and stilled, panting. “I need to pee.”

  He sighed. “Well, you ought to stay still and be forthcoming with some information then, shouldn’t you? And quickly.”

  She locked her teeth together, wishing with all her might that he would just disappear.

  Wishing couldn’t activate spells any longer, however, not anymore, and thus would do her no good. She didn’t have any powers anymore; right when she began to feel comfortable experimenting with them, papa had put the cuff on her and thus had taken them away. Before the cuff, every now and then, she could get lightning to strike around where she wanted it to, and right before her powers were subdued, she could get the wind to blow so hard that she could take off and even fly in a particular direction if she put out her coat like wings. She’d flown over a mile before. Also, she could hear trees talk—they never said anything interesting, but it was something that nobody else seemed to be able to do.

  That seemed to be the totality of her powers. Making wizards disappear was not on the list, even if she’d been cuffless.

  So, when he looked closer at her cuff, there was nothing she could do except attempt to bite him. “Don’t even think about it,” he grumbled as soon as she thought about the biting strategy. “I heal very quickly, and biting me
would make me very angry.”

  She wondered if he could read minds, but denied, “I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

  “Then don’t run your tongue over the bottom of your teeth as if deciding if they’re sharp enough to bite me hard enough for me to let you go.” He turned her arm around and then blinked at something. “Hoel?” Again, he looked up in her eyes.

  This day could not possibly get any worse.

  “Who?” she asked, as if the word meant nothing to her.

  “Do not give me that ‘who’ nonsense. You are certainly not an owl, and ‘whoing’ will get you nowhere. I am well over a millennium old, so let me assure you that being coy doesn’t interest me in the least. Hoel put his name on this. So tell me why he put this on you. Were you foolish enough to come across his path and use your powers on him?”

  “No,” she said, heat returning to her cheeks.

  “Did he or an ally of his try you for some crime?”

  “No,” she replied even more firmly.

  He suddenly looked very tired. “Are you going to joust with me until sundown or are you just going to tell me the truth?” Somehow, his weariness was waning his look of hostility. She was beginning to feel more and more like he thought of her like some stubborn child who had been caught stealing an apple.

  And she didn’t care. She could run him around the bush as many times as necessary until he tired and she wet herself. She wasn’t going to say anything that might get her ransomed back to Hoel.

  He rolled his eyes up to the tree canopy and swore under his breath. Finally, he let go of her arm. “Go make water and continue getting dressed. And do not try to run, because I am most certainly faster than you and if I have to catch you, the whole of my powers will be the last of your worries, since you will be too distracted with my belt reddening your little backside.”

  “You’re the one who caught me in a trap!” she snapped at him, made incredulous by his threat. “You are the one who inconvenienced me, not the other way around! How dare you treat me like I’m some animal that you need to corral?”

  “Do you know when it was that I saw a cuff like that last?” he asked her, pointing at her arm. When she didn’t answer, because of course she didn’t know and didn’t want to play his game of stronger-and-wiser-than-thou-art, he continued, “On a murderous witch who killed fifty children and escaped our hold over three times when we brought her in for execution. Those cuffs are no light matter, madam; they are very serious, which means you are a serious problem that I plan to figure out.” He leaned closer toward her and she took a step back. “I didn’t want to do this sort of thing today, but here you are and here I am. Although I’m sure you’re currently congratulating yourself on how brave you are not to tell me anything useful, I’m just beginning to get vexed, and I’m not a very nice man when I’m vexed.”

  She stepped back once more, feeling weak with emotion from their conversation. She turned her back and walked slowly away from him like he was a bear who would happily maul her any moment. Now, she really did need to pee.

  Chapter Three

  Ashcroft picked up the net and folded it neatly as the black-haired witchling sniffled while she tried to relieve herself behind a nearby bush.

  He felt a pang—a very, very small pang—of guilt because of the hurt look on her face when he pressed her for information, but then he didn’t trust his own kind farther than the end of his nose. He didn’t know how old the seemingly innocent little witch was, but knew that there was no way to tell if she was eighteen years old or eighteen hundred.

  One thing he did know was how powerful Hoel was. He was a demigod healer who did not take kindly to magi. He was famous for his mistrust and dislike for Ashcroft’s whole race. Why would a demigod go through all that trouble to bind a witch’s power instead of just killing her?

  Ashcroft couldn’t ignore the possibility that the girl was a criminal who was set to stand trial for something. Hopefully not for killing a schoolhouse full of children or something of the sort. There was something about her looks that innerved Ashcroft, and for the life of him, he couldn’t put his finger on exactly what.

  What innerved him couldn’t have been that she was a sexy little thing, because he was sure that that was the only thing likeable about her. He’d liked what he’d seen of her body so far. She had delicious little breasts under that camisole she was wearing; in the daylight, he could see her lean little figure and her wide hips’ shadow. She would be a vision naked.

  Of course, anyone would make a vision for Ashcroft at his point. Ashcroft couldn’t even remember the last time he’d had sex… After his Charlotte had died around two decades ago, he had gone through a period of time where he tried to sleep his trouble away in the bed of nearly every whore in the Northlands, under the advisement of his steward, Moriarty Miles, who assured him that sex was the quickest way to shirk a suicidal depression.

  When that didn’t work, Moriarty then pushed him into having relations with every loose girl that presided in Cambridge, England, which was near the portal connecting the Earthside to the Otherworld near his tower home.

  Eventually it came to a culmination that he and Moriarty’s plans of Ashcroft fucking as his medicine to repair his broken mental health was actually making things worse, not better. He was thinking about Charlotte more, not less, comparing her to multitudes of women, and he was going through those women in numbers that he hadn’t had imagined sexing before. Before Charlotte, he hadn’t had sex with many women; he hadn’t even coupled with a woman before Charlotte for nearly a century. Now, he was once again in a dry spell…

  And it was a dry spell that he wanted to see drowned as soon as he caught a glimpse of the witch tugging her dress over herself. Somehow, she looked better dressed than she had in her undergarments. There was something about the curve of her neck and the way her hair trailed down past her small waist that nearly made him want to bend her over and take her in the grass.

  Maybe he could! Maybe he could blackmail her…

  No. He closed his eyes. He wasn’t that sort of man. He never had been, and he never would be. He had other things to think about now.

  Like what did the great Hoel, a demigod famous for killing and distrusting all manner of wizards, have to do with the little slip of a girl in front of him? It was a mystery that needed solving, and right soon.

  “Come along,” he said when he watched her finish dressing and begin to fix up her hair. She was obviously just stalling now. “I do not want to be here much longer. I want to get closer to the road.”

  She hesitated, but eventually, with a small little sigh of defeat, moved toward him.

  Her shoes and the bottom of her skirts were absolutely caked in mud, but her dress disclosed that she was upper class; it was hand-stitched, delicately fitted to her. The girl didn’t have blemishes, or hands with work sores on them. Her fingernails were long, strong, and healthy, and her teeth were white. No, this girl had access to baths, running water, and servants.

  He put out his hand. She looked at it very skeptically. “Put your hand in mine.”

  She looked up at him with abhorrence, then crossed her arms over her breasts stubbornly. “Oh, absolutely not! I’m not holding your hand. I’m not a child, or your lover.”

  “No, you’re my prisoner. So, unless you would rather walk with your hands bound behind your back, you’ll hold my hand,” he said, issuing yet another ultimatum. He hated when he had to be firm like this; he knew it wasn’t scoring him any popularity points.

  “Well, I’m not holding your hand.”

  And so he sighed, snagged some of the enchanted rope from the net, and turned her around. She had her little chin in the air like she was winning at a game they were playing. She didn’t seem to quite understand yet that he didn’t like playing games. He didn’t like games when he was younger, and he sure as hell didn’t like them now.

  “I can’t believe you. You’re twice my size. Is this really necessary?” she griped as he
tied her wrists together. “The rope’s itchy.”

  “No, it’s not. It’s scratchy,” he corrected. “And I can throw you much farther than I could trust you. Stop whining.”

  He took her elbow and tugged her forward now that her hands were bound, holding her tight. She made some unhappy huffs, but eventually asked, “Where are you taking me, anyway?”

  He wasn’t sure. Ashcroft had always had a fascination with the great Hoel—the demon-esque demigod was extremely old, very learned, and very powerful. But Ashcroft had the great misfortune of being a wizard, and like all wizards—at least, like all wise ones—he stayed the hell away from Hoel. At one point back when Ashcroft was a small boy, Hoel had nearly exterminated an entire faction of wizards. He could remember his father speaking of Hoel, saying that he was a horrible enemy for a wizard to have, and an unnecessary enemy, too, since Hoel liked to mind his own business unless antagonized or threatened. His father used to say, “Stay out of his way, and he’ll be quite satisfied to stay out of yours.”

  Already Ashcroft felt nervous about potentially being in Hoel’s way. Nervous, yet excited to have an opportunity to be the first wizard to get in Hoel’s path and live to talk about it.

  Still, Ashcroft couldn’t help but wonder how the girl would react if he said, “To Hoel’s. I’m sure he’d know what to do with you.”

  She fascinated him by forcing herself onto the ground. He had to pull to keep her on her feet, but now he was dragging her whole body weight. “No!” she said between gritted teeth. “You don’t know what you’re doing! You’re going to kill me!”

  “If I was unfortunate enough to be under Hoel’s scrutiny, I too would be upset, but I see little choice,” he said, pretending not to care about her fate. Of course he did care—she was a cute little thing. It seemed to be a shame to see her dead.

  She pulled backwards on his arm with all her might, digging her heels into the ground. Ashcroft had to pull to keep her upright. “Hoel’s not the one who’ll kill me, you fool! He’s my father!”