tremor in her voice gave him pause. He peered around them warily, expecting instantaneous attack from unseen hellions lurching from his nightmares. Only the bitter wind snaked about him. Nonetheless, the clouding of his breath quickened when next he formed words.
“Tell me,” he said uncertainly, “tell me of this…devil who’s imprisoned you.”
“A warlock,” the woman explained over her shoulder. “A powerful warlock who holds this territory in thrall.”
Alcala’s eyebrows rose thoughtfully. “The one opposed by troops garrisoned at Barbaso? The one who calls himself Domingo Negro—Black Sunday”?
“The same. But what matter to you?”
“I have a certain interest in this business. Tell me more. All that you know.”
She shrugged weakly. “He’s a wily one, that one. Wily and wicked. I know only that he rules my people with an evil hand. Takes what he wishes. And he’s imprisoned me here for so long…so long. And do you know the jest of it? The faery ring hides me from the eyes of all who pass, save for those who possess neither the courage nor the cleverness to free me. You’re the seventh since I last stopped counting.”
A seething anger in the knight’s breast swept the chill before it. He swung down off his mount, his boots crunching into the snow. Licking dried and cracked lips, he stepped awkwardly through the snow, dimly aware of making more of the slow progress than was necessary. Nearing the ring, seeing the woman’s surprise and dawning hope, he considered his pistol’s heft a moment before belting it.
“Can it be,” she began in disbelief, rising, her breath coming in rapid gasps that punctuated her words, “that the ring has misjudged one at last? After so long? So very long? The ring, it—it—keeps me warm—keeps me from hunger—preserves me in this living death. But I’m so bored. So desperately lonely.”
Alcala watched the swift tracery of rolling tears that coursed the woman’s cheeks. He rubbed his sweating palms together. “What prevents you from leaving it?” he asked.
“The warlock said—” She paused to wipe her eyes. “He said I’d be burned to a cinder if ever I tried to pass over the blooms. I’d be blackened like a morning ember. Aren’t you afraid?” Her breast heaved with anxious excitement.
He cleared his throat. “Not very. Have you ever tested it? Say, with a piece of your clothing?”
Her eyes widened with innocent wonder, as if at a revelation. She tossed off her hood. Her lustrous, tousled hair tumbled over one shoulder. A wild expectancy flooded over Alcala: He thought she would next throw off her cloak, and he had decided that there would be nothing beneath but a lovely expanse of eurythmic whiteness, swaying to sensuous music.
Instead she reached out her hand.
“No-no!” the soldier warned. “Stand well back.”
His sword scraped free. Clutching it with both hands, he dug its point into the snow beneath an orange firebloom. A wolf howled across the snowy plain. Alcala glanced behind him to where his steed snorted and pawed.
“Do you know its secret?” The woman fretted, her hands moving to her throat.
“I’m not sure. Stay back—”
Sucking in a harsh breath, Alcala pitched the glowing ball out of the ring. It lofted like a will-o’-the-wisp and descended in a slow arc that seemed to carry it back toward the faery ring. The knight raised his blade defensively as the woman gasped. But the bloom of incendiary sorcery at last dropped into the snow, where it was received with a bubbling hiss and dismissed with a brief column of steam.
Heartened by the natural reaction, the knight flicked another, and then another ball of eldritch incandescence into the dousing drifts. When he had thus cleared about a third of the faery ring’s circumference, he stood at its edge and smiled thinly at the maiden.
“I don’t even know your name.”
“Time for names, words, endearments later,” she replied in a rushed whisper. “Can you get me out of this?”
He reached his hand across the broken faery ring, felt the warmth within, beckoned to her. Slowly, hesitantly she approached, touched his fingers, clasped his hand gently, her eyes pressing back the tears, her mouth forming words soundlessly.
Finally she found voice.
“I can…I can think of only one way to thank you,” she whispered deeply. “But you must appreciate my disadvantage. It’s been so very long since…”
Her lips brushed his, their breaths mingling hotly. She kissed him again more urgently, her arms clinging about his neck, her tongue seeking his.
At last the corporal of pistoleros drew back from her, caressed her shoulders, regarded the yielding in her moist eyes, the heaving of her bosom.
“It’s still warm inside,” she whispered. “Warm and soft. The night is long, and dangerous for travel. Nothing will enter here.” She drew him by the gloved hands toward the center of the ring.
Humility, had the knight. Yes, and temperance, too, in roughly the same measure. It had been many weeks since he’d seen his wife. And he’d been with no other woman.
The enchanted ring he shared with the grateful maiden was approximately ten feet in diameter, warm as the sea breeze in May and fragrant as the gardens of Granada. Its floor was laced with angel’s breath, and to lie upon it after so many nights of frozen ground and saddle-slumping—with so delicious a maiden—was a prospect pardonable in the most onerous of confessionals.
So Alcala removed his gloves and cast off his morion, doffed his sword belt and pistol. Indifferent to the alarms in his soul. Heedless to the reappearance of the magic firebulbs that again completed the faery ring. Hearing nothing of the wilderness cries of the predators whose ululations carried the news from pack to pack.
Alcala pulled the ring maiden against him, eager to hold her again. Her slender arms twined about his neck, her fingers ruffling his hair as she pulled him downward, their mouths becoming one.
Downward, slowly downward slithered those inhumanly grasping arms, joining at his back now, squeezing. Squeezing the breath from his lungs such that he couldn’t draw enough air through his nostrils. But when he tried to disengage his lips from the seamless suction of her own, he found his mouth engulfed by a nauseating sticky wetness.
His eyes bulged in shock and pain when his backplate collapsed in her lethal embrace. He caught a fleeting glimpse of milky flat gray spreading through her erstwhile sultry eyes, and then blinding white-hot streaks filled his vision as his breath hissed from his lungs, the vacuum crushing them.
The last sound he heard in his smothering torment was the caving in of his rib cage. Blackness overwhelmed him, sparing him the sight and sensation of the wetly lashing appendage that blasted through steel plate, and then again and again—through the flesh and bone of his back, battering and gouging—until it reached and removed his stilled heart.
* * * *
The riderless mount whinnied and stamped, curvetting and bolting wildly among the winter-shocked poplars. But it could find no escape through the ring of dark shapes that closed about it at Hell’s own mocking pace.
