Captive Heart by Phoenix Sullivan Read Free Book Online

I needed to confide. About Nessie. About how my dreams were haunted by what Nessie might be suffering at the hands of the Red Knight.
    I tried to tell him, but my words were silenced by the failing of my heart.
    “Courage,” he told me then, as he brushed a strand of hair from my tearing eye. A gesture of compassion. Of empathy. The physical touch reminded me that the most powerful fae in the world was as susceptible to pain and hurt and love as any who had walked these mortal lands. My fae blood stirred in a vision that came upon me falcon-swift of Merlin trapped—no, entombed —in a crystal cave. It burned across my inner eye, and then the vision expanded and I was listening with Merlin’s ears from within the cave. From without, beyond the crystal reach of magic, I heard a familiar laugh that chilled me to the bone.
    Nimue.
    I grabbed Merlin’s hand, clutching at it, feeling its warmth, assuring myself of the life it held.
    He smiled at me then, father to child, mentor to protégé. “Never fear the future, for what comes is already written and has already passed.”
    “Then you know…?”
     “Too much. And yet never enough. Every journey ends in sorrow. But that doesn’t mean the journey itself cannot be a happy one.”
    “What can you tell me of my sister?”
    “Can you bear the truth?”
    A hole opened in my gut and I felt myself falling through it. There was truth that needed bearing?
    I nodded. I had to hear it.
    “Ironside slakes himself upon her. His revenge is watching her innocence bleed away.”
    “You’ve seen this?”
    “It takes no gift of far-seeing to know that. To cope, she must retreat to a new reality of her own making. When you find her, she may not be the same sister who was spirited away.”
     The hole kept expanding…expanding. But I grabbed the lifeline Merlin had thrown and clawed my way back through. “ When I find her?”
    “Whether your quest wins or fails, Ironside will ensure you’re reunited with your sister. He means to hurt you. Would he keep you from seeing her utterly destroyed?”
    I shook my head.
    I wanted to tell him that Nimue was a part of this. That she played games with lives and had designs on him. But Nimue also had power—more than me—and knowing she might know my own thoughts as clearly as me curbed my tongue. “There’s something more. Something…I can’t tell you. I thought I could. I thought I had the courage.”
    “Sometimes it takes more courage not to speak. Take your knights and go. And remember: While already written, if you have yet to read it, the future has a way of surprising us all.”
     

Chapter 12

Gareth / Beau
    Marrok, Lyn and I met before sunrise in the courtyard. Arthur had seen to the loaning of horses for each of us, and three magnificent animals awaited. The two battle-trained stallions arched their necks and shook their manes at our approach. Even the smooth-coated chestnut palfrey for the lady seemed far from the docile trail beast as it stepped high and whinnied when the horsemaster led her to Lyn.
    “She’s a handsome one,” Lyn said, “but what of the mare I rode in on. Alice?”
    “A swollen knee, m’lady. She’ll be sound again soon enough. But for now she needs rest.”
    We had sent our belongings ahead and the stable hands had packed our things onto my own Cornish pony. She was a sturdy mare but, by intention as I came here under concealment, one that didn’t catch the eye the way these other three did. When I saw my own packs slung over the mare’s withers, I nodded. Once away from the castle, I could don the armor those packs held.
    Somewhere Marrok had found armor of his own. Of better quality than any squire would wear and well-matched between the black leather of the scaled hauberk, black shield strapped to his arm and black helm that dangled from his hand, it was likely to have been property of a knight now slain.
    It was natural, then, for the horsemaster to next hand the black stallion of the pair