David Eddings: The Shining Ones

‘I think you underestimate Sparhawk’s devotion to you, Ehlana,’ Krager said. ‘He’ll give up anything to gain your safe return.’

‘He won’t have to,’ Ehlana snapped. ‘I’ll deal with the four of you myself. Do you really think you can get out of here when one word from me will bring half the garrison running?’

‘You won’t give that word, however,’ Scarpa sneered. ‘You’re just a little too arrogant, woman. I think you need to know the full reality of your situation.’ He turned and pointed at Baroness Melidere. ‘Kill that one,’ he commanded Elron.

‘But...’ the pasty-faced literary poseur began to object.

‘Kill her!’ Scarpa snapped. ‘If you don’t, I’ll kill you!’ Elron tremblingly drew his rapier and advanced on the defiant Baroness.

‘It’s not a knitting-needle, you clot,’ Melidere told him. ‘You can’t even hold it right. Stick to butchering language, Elron. You don’t have the skill—or the stomach—to move up to people yet, although your so-called poetry’s bad enough to make people want to die.’

‘How dare you?’ he almost screamed, his face turning purple.

‘How’s your “Ode to Blue” coming, Elron?’ she taunted him. ‘You could make a fortune peddling that one as an emetic, you know. I felt the urge to vomit before you’d finished reciting the first stanza.’

He howled in absolute rage and made a clumsy thrust with his rapier. Ehlana had watched Stragen training Sarabian often enough to know that the thrust was well off the mark. The intrepid Baroness, however, coolly deflected the blade with the wrist of the hand she seemed to be raising in a futilely defensive gesture, and Elron’s blade passed smoothly through her shoulder. Melidere gasped, clutching at the blade to conceal the exact location of the wound. Then she lurched back to pull herself free of the blade and clawed at the wound to spread the blood spurting from it over the bodice of her nightdress. Then she fell.

‘You murderer!’ Ehlana shrieked, rushing to her fallen friend. She hurled herself across Melidere’s inert body, weeping and crying out in apparent anguish. ‘Are you all right?’ she muttered under her breath between sobs.

‘It’s only a scratch,’ Melidere lied, also in a whisper.

‘Tell Sparhawk that I’m all right,’ the queen instructed, tugging off her ring and concealing it in Melidere’s bodice, ‘and tell him that I forbid him to give up Bhelliom, no matter what they threaten to do to me.’ She rose to her feet, her face tear-streaked. ‘You’ll hang for this, Elron,’ she said in a deadly voice, ‘or maybe I’ll have you burned at the stake instead—with a slow fire.’ She pulled a blanket from the bed and quickly covered Melidere with it to prevent too close an examination.

‘We will leave now,’ Scarpa said coldly. ‘That other one is also your friend, I believe.’ He pointed at the ashen-faced Alcan. ‘We’ll take her along and if you make any outcry at all, I’ll personally slit her throat.’

‘You’re forgetting the message, Scarpa,’ Krager said pulling a folded piece of paper from the inside of his leather Peloi jacket. ‘We have to leave a friendly little note for Sparhawk—just to let him know that we stopped by to call.’ Then he drew a small knife. ‘Your pardon, Queen Ehlana,’ he smirked, exhaling the sharp, acrid reek of his wine-sodden breath into her face, ‘but I need a bit of authentication to prove to Sparhawk that we’re really holding you captive.’ He took hold of a lock of Ehlana’s hair and roughly sawed it off with his knife. ‘We’ll just leave this with our note so that he can compare it with later ones to verify that it’s really yours.’ His grin grew even more vicious ‘if you should feel a sudden urge to cry out, Ehlana, just remember that all we really need is your head. We can harvest hair from that, so we won’t need to bring the rest of you along if you start being too much bother.’