“You there, hush!” Holt commanded as he approached.
The shrieking didn’t stop; ’twas almost as if the man took no breaths. Children were crying, women on their knees, men staring at the sorcerer as if he were the Christ arisen again.
“Stop now, or I’ll kill you.”
“Nay!” one woman, the baker’s pregnant wife, cried. “Sir Holt, you cannot. He’s but a half-wit or …”
“Pull him down!” Holt ordered his soldiers.
“Oh, please, no. He means no harm.”
“Do you not remember that he cursed Dwyrain?”
“That’s right,” the miller said, his frown deep. “We all suffered much. I lost a son.”
“And I a sister,” a woman said, but there was no conviction in her voice.
“My boy lost his leg,” another woman said with a catch in her voice. They stared at the man as if he were a saint rather than the hellmonger he was.
“Show some mercy,” Father Timothy pleaded, and Holt saw that his misgivings about the priest had proven true. Holt had always doubted the man’s allegiance to him. Timothy was weak in his faith and in his convictions. Holt had no use for him.
“The sorcerer is not a man of God, but practices pagan magic,” he reminded Timothy.
“He’s misguided.”
“As well as being a traitor to Dwyrain. This man helped the prisoner escape,” Holt said. How had the magician managed that? Who was the second rider? Several men appeared at his side, and while the man screamed, he was dragged from his horse, and the owl, startled, flew away with a great flapping of his wings. Feathers fluttered to the ground. Two huge, burly soldiers held the prisoner fast, and the sight was pitiful, for he was a thin cripple who struggled not and would become a martyr if Holt wasn’t careful.
“Who are you?” Holt threw at him, asking a question that had never before been answered. “Why are you here?”
The screaming suddenly stopped and the man’s fevered, mindless eyes once again were eerily intelligent, more frightening than when he appeared riotously insane. “I, Sir Holt, am your conscience, that nasty prick of worry that you’ve hidden deep but sometimes keeps you awake at night.”
The moon appeared from behind a cloud, bathing the sorcerer’s face in a silvery, nearly angelic glow. Holt shivered in his boots.
“What say you?” Holt asked again. The man was truly addled, but a drip of fear slid down Holt’s spine.
“I’m your conscience, for I know what you’ve done.”
There was no reason to listen to this. “Take him away!” Holt roared, trying to stem the dread that was slowly scraping at his soul.
“Is not the baron dead?” the cripple demanded.
Holt rounded and crashed his fist into the madman’s face.
Several women gasped and fell to their knees, praying loudly. The wind picked up, scattering dry leaves and playing with hems of surcoats and mantles.
“Ask him,” the prisoner said to the crowd. “Ask him if he hasn’t been poisoning Baron Ewan each day, and when the old man didn’t die quickly—”
“Enough! Take him to the dungeon. He’ll be hanged at dawn!”
The magician had the audacity, the sheer, stupid insolence, to laugh. “Is that what you do to your adversaries, Holt? Kill them? Sneak into their chambers and place the skin of a bear over their faces until they can no longer draw a breath, as you did with the baron? Or do you marry them off, as you plan to do with Lady Cayley? Are you not planning to have her wed an old, cruel man who will kill her?”
“Take him away!” Holt swallowed hard. How had this … this addled half-wit known what he’d done? If anyone found out about the death of Ewan or if Connor discovered that Holt planned to betray him … He felt a tremor of fear, for Connor was a coldhearted bastard.
The guards pushed their captive roughly toward the north tower, but the sorcerer laughed again, the sound hideous to Holt’s ears. “Enjoy your short rule as baron. Holt of Prydd,” the sorcerer said with a patient, knowing smile. “ ’Twill soon be over!”
Holt’s temper exploded and he caught up with his captive. “You fool,” he uttered as he smashed a fist into the cripple’s gut, causing the man to double over. If not for the guards holding him upright, he wo
uld have fallen to the ground.