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Legends, Love, Loss, and Surrender

Chapter Four
The Stuff of Legend

Methos could again feel the heat of the woman's body and her warm, moist breath across his face as she stood before him. Long nails lightly scraped his cheek as the gag was pulled away. He winced as the rough cloth pulled at the raw flesh at the corners of his mouth. He heard and felt the woman back away a couple of steps.

"Wh-who are you?" he rasped, surprised by how rough his voice was.

He heard the rustle of clothing and the whoosh of air in time to tense, but there was nothing he could do to avoid the slap that struck his cheek with such force that his neck cracked and the entire left side of his face exploded in pain before going Novocain numb. With his tongue, he checked for loose teeth and tasted fresh blood where his molars had cut the inside of his cheek top and bottom. He waited until he stopped swaying in his bonds so that he could regain his tenuous balance on the balls of his feet.

"What do you want?" he demanded, forcing his voice to be firm rather than fearful.

This time, a vicious backhand caught him across the other cheek, sending a knife of sharp pain through his face as the stone of a large ring split the skin open right where it was thinnest over the cheekbone.

"Fuck, woman!" he shouted in anger as he felt the blood running down his cheek.

A hard uppercut snapped his head back and made him see stars as it staggered him backwards. He scrabbled with his toes to find purchase on the smooth cement floor and fought not to reveal how much pain he was feeling from the strain on his wrists, arms, and shoulders.

Finally regaining his equilibrium, he growled, "Give me a sword, and . . ."

A blow to the solar plexus knocked the rest of the air from his lungs and set him swinging in his bonds like a pendulum as he reflexively curled into a ball, gasping and sobbing for breath. Tears of anguish soaked the blindfold as the cuffs bit cruelly into his wrists and muscles and joints stretched and strained almost to the point of tearing, but all he could do for the moment was hang there, struggling to breathe. Seconds passed like hours until the agony of oxygen-starved lungs was finally less than the pain of over-stretched limbs, and slowly, he lowered his feet to the floor.

This time, he just stood there, waiting. He didn't think he could take another hit like that so soon. It was all he could do to keep himself steady, and he was certain that if his bonds were cut right then, he would collapse on the floor in a heap. When heard the soft click of a knife being pulled from its sheath, a lump of cold lead settled in his stomach. One did not take heads with a knife. She intended to torture him some more.

He felt the heat of her body on his bare skin as she moved into his space once again. He didn't flinch or make a sound. Stoically, he waited, searching for that core of strength that would let him take whatever came next. Time seemed to stretch to infinity as he stood there, oblivious to everything except the burning pain in his arms and back, which he could not ignore completely, and the malevolent presence beside him, on which he was keenly focused because her movement would be the only warning he would have before her next action.

She leaned closer. He felt the air stir and tensed involuntarily. Her breath was warm on his cheek again, and then, defying all his expectations, she whispered softly in his ear.

"Good boy, Methos. You're still a quick study, aren't you?" she praised him.

He gasped and trembled as she raked her nails lightly down his ribs, teasing and making his skin tingle.

"I'm glad to see the years haven't addled your mind," she hissed in his ear. "I promise you'll have your chance to speak before I take your head, but only when I am ready to hear you."

Her tongue laved his right ear, tracing the ridges before darting into the canal, and he whimpered, helpless to resist responding. He caught himself panting in anticipation as she licked and kissed and nipped her way across his cheek. When her lips found his, he tried to turn away, but the flat of her knife's blade against his cheek stopped him. When her tongue sought entrance, he clenched his teeth until the knife traced its way down his midline to rest against his scrotum, the tip of it penetrating the heavy fabric of his jeans and just barely piercing the skin.

She ravaged his mouth, locating all of his hot spots, and stealing his breath. Beneath the metallic tang of blood, his own blood, he realized, which she had licked from his wounded cheek, he tasted strong red wine and dark chocolate. When she found the spot on the roof of his mouth that made him moan, his resistance collapsed. He relaxed into the kiss and his arms twitched in his bonds with the impulse to take her in his embrace.

His intellect told him that this woman knew his body intimately and that he should be searching his memories for a former Immortal lover who would be angry enough to kill him or kinky enough to torture and terrorize him and Macleod as part of a seduction scene, but his body shouted his intellect down, screaming, More! More! More!

Then he really did scream, in pain, as she bit a hole through his lower lip. Blood streamed down his chin and dripped onto his chest making him sticky, and it flooded his mouth and made him retch. He fought the urge to vomit knowing the pain that would send through his strained ribs and back, and instead spat each time his mouth filled, at first spraying through the hole her teeth had made until the wound closed. Ultimately, it was the copious bleeding that saved him another beating because he wasn't able to curse her before he had remembered that he had been told to wait for her permission to speak.

He heard the knife snick back into its sheath and turned his head in her direction. Gathering a mouthful of blood and saliva, he spat at her as hard as he could. His ears told him she didn't even flinch, and he could only assume he had missed the mark. Then he heard her boots thumping across the floor as she approached Macleod again.

When Macleod heard the woman draw her sword he had resigned himself to an immediate death. He was surprised how quickly peace came over him, and deeply touched when he heard Methos offering himself instead. So much for no heroics, he thought in amusement, grateful that his last moment could lift his doomed spirit. Then the unexpected happened, and the chain that held his wrists bound to his feet broke apart. He heard Methos sobbing and wanted to do something to assure him that he was alive, but he was still too much in shock to make a sound. His relief and his friend's grief were both short-lived, though, for without the chain between his extremities to keep him bent backward, Macleod overbalanced and fell forward. His wrists, still cuffed around the pole at his back, caught his fall, and he moaned in pain at the strain on his shoulders and the bruising pressure on his arms.

Mike had then released his ankles and helped him to reposition himself so he was sitting on the floor, legs stretched out before him, leaning back, hands still cuffed around the pole. His feet were chained again, and the young man had asked him if he was more comfortable. He indicated that he was, and then his blindfold was cut away.

He was still blinking against the light when the powerful female Immortal stalked slowly past him on her way to Methos. Macleod was sure he would have remembered a six-foot-tall, Immortal woman with a mane of red hair that fell past her hips if she had ever crossed his path, so he had to assume she either had a history with Methos or she was a barking mad sociopath who would get off on torturing them both before she finally took their heads.

All Duncan could do was watch as the woman stripped his friend with her sword, toying with him as a cat would do a mouse. As disgusted as he was by the way she tormented the helpless man, Macleod could not help but admire her skill with the long, heavy steel sword modeled on the ancient Celtic style. Methos was trembling and writhing in pain, but her cuts were consistently smooth, shallow, narrow, and delicate. It took a steady hand to do that in the best of circumstances, and having a subject moving and swaying under one's blade was certainly not the best of circumstances.

Once she had Methos stripped to the waist, the fiery-haired woman made one more long cut down the center of his back, just to show how strong she was to still maintain such precise control after holding the heavy blade so long, or just to hurt the other Immortal, or just for the hell of it, Mac wasn't sure. Finally, she cut the gag loose and with surprising gentleness, pulled it from Methos's mouth. Then, to Mac's horror, she took a fighting stance.

Before Duncan could decide whether warning his friend would make things better by preparing him for the beating he was about to receive or make things worse by giving the woman an excuse to hurt him more, Methos had asked her to identify herself and got viciously smacked for it. She only struck him three more times before he stopped talking, but it was as brutal a beating as Macleod had ever seen, and it only got worse from there.

Now that she was done molesting his friend, the woman turned to Macleod again. The first thing he noticed about her when she was finally facing him was the intensity of her expression. With her shining, emerald green eyes fixed on him in a predatory stare, she already made him feel naked without removing so much as a stitch of his clothing and he could sense that she was very old and very powerful. As she stalked across the room toward him, he noticed the bright red spray of blood, Methos's blood, across her white cashmere sweater. It would have been a pretty pattern, had he not known what it was. As things stood now, it was a beacon calling him to stop this madwoman by any means necessary before she did some kind of damage that would not heal.

As she approached and drew her knife, Mac lifted his chin defiantly. The blade was sharp, but it was small. She did not mean to take his head, yet. She wanted only make him cower in fear, and he would not be cowed. When he expected to be stripped and to have lines traced on his skin as she had done to Methos, she surprised him by cutting the gag and gently removing it from his mouth.

"I am Duncan Macleod . . ." he dared to speak, even after what he had just witnessed, hoping to keep her attention on him a while and give his friend time to recover.

Once again she caught him by surprise. "Of the Clan Macleod," she interrupted in a sultry voice even as she managed to sound bored. "Yes, I know who you are, Highlander; your reputation precedes you. But I was you more than a thousand years before you were you, so do not expect me to be impressed."

Puzzled by her words, he said, "Well, if my name means so little to you, maybe you'd prefer to meet my sword."

She rolled her eyes and chuckled, a low, soft bubbling sound in her throat. "Nay, Macleod, my fight is not with you today. You keep that great melon that sits atop your neck a while longer," she said in a lilting tone that seemed both deeply familiar and utterly foreign to him. "Let it ripen and grow something worth having inside it. Then, if we both still walk this earth in another thousand years, perhaps I will come back for it."

Macleod was sure he'd never met this woman, but he felt like he should still know her. The cadence of her speech and the imagery that she used felt like home to him, but her accent wasn't Scottish. The age and energy she exuded spoke of something deep and ancient, far older than the mere words she uttered, something that went back to a time when real power resided in an individual and magic was more than just a party trick.

"I don't think you could take it in a fight, woman." Macleod put a derisive emphasis on the last word, hoping to strike a nerve, and nearly had more success that he wanted. Faster than his eyes could follow, she threw the knife left-handed with deadly accuracy, sticking it an inch deep in the pole just above his head, even while drawing her sword with her right hand. The blade came whistling down and for a split second, Mac feared he had miscalculated. Then the edge of the sword rested lightly on his neck.

"You'd best mind your manners, whelp! I know enough of Highland women to know your màthair (1) would take the hide off your backside for speaking to any woman with such disrespect," she warned him.

When Duncan's eyes popped in surprise, she gave him a smug grin. "O, seadh, Dhonnchaidh Macleoid, tha mi a' bruidhinn Gàidhlig, 'n' Ah spaek a wee bit o braid Scots, tae, though I haven't much used either since Longshanks set Toom Tabard on the throne. I knew what was coming after that, and I'd already seen enough of war to last me ten thousand lifetimes." (2)

Macleod nodded, carefully because the sword was still against his neck. That explained why she seemed so familiar. She'd lived in Scotland over three hundred years before he was born and left when the Wars of Independence began.

"So, you ran like a frightened rabbit," he said. She hadn't taken his head yet, and he doubted she would take it now.

She drew the sword across his throat, making a thin, stinging slice in the skin. "Careful Macleod," she warned him. "Just because I don't want to hurt you doesn't mean I won't do it to teach you a lesson, and just because I don't want your head doesn't mean I won't take it if you piss me off."

Lowering her sword and looking toward Methos, she told him, "You're only alive now because I think this gàrderch (3) has duped you as he once did me. If I believed you had allied yourself with him knowing his true nature, I would have taken your head first thing just to keep you out of the way while I dealt with him."

Macleod had not ducked from her knife when she threw it. He would not be frightened into silence by her words. She had a story to tell and she needed an audience. "All of our kind are bastards," he said. "So I can't hold that against him." When the woman looked at him curiously, he shrugged. "I don't speak your language," he assured her, "but some words sound the same in many tongues."

The woman glared at Methos for a moment and then turned her gaze back to Duncan. "What do you really know about him?" she asked.

Mac decided to stick with current events. Like most Immortals, Methos had gone by a number of names and done many things, not all of them good. If this woman did not know his friend's true name, telling her would only endanger him more. If she already knew who Methos was, she would understand why he kept his identity such a closely guarded secret and would not be surprised if Macleod didn't know his true name.

"He has been Adam Pierson for as long as I have known him," Macleod replied evenly. "I know him well enough to know that he's my friend, and that's all I need to know about him."

The woman laughed. "Adam, eh?" She called across the room to Methos, "The first man. Are you really that arrogant, or is it just that the irony amuses you?" Turning back to Macleod, she said, "I met him as Lucius Juventius Quietus, vicarius to a sniveling, greedy Roman administrator, sort of a liaison, if you will, between the governor and his local underling. I learned to trust him as Remus, a former slave, sympathetic to our cause. I loved him as Methos, the oldest of our kind, a man who could understand my loss when others could not. And for two thousand years now, I have cursed his name as Death for betraying my people and costing so many of their lives. (4)"

When the woman spoke of betrayal, Macleod saw Methos hang his head and knew, whether it was intentional or accidental, whether he had set her up or just got caught in a situation where he couldn't help her, Methos had, at least in part, been responsible, if not guilty, for the crime of which she was accusing him. Mac also knew that he didn't really care, at least not now. He'd all too recently learned of the terrible things his friend had done in the past as the Fourth Horseman, and after a lot of sleepless nights and a couple of long talks on Holy Ground, he'd finally accepted that the Methos he knew now was no more Death than he, himself, was the murdering, mad Scott who had hunted down and slain English officers in front of their wives and children after Culloden. He didn't know enough of this story to judge his friend, and he didn't know the woman at all.

"That man is Adam Pierson," Macleod insisted. "He is one of us, so I am sure his story is long and there are parts he has not shared with me. Methos is a myth. He's a story that we tell ourselves on nights when we can't sleep for fear of being caught off guard in the hopes that if one man can be that lucky for that long, then maybe we can, too. If he ever existed, he's been swallowed by history. What I would like to know, is who might you be?"

The flame-haired woman stared at Methos in stony silence for a long time. Macleod had nearly given up on getting an answer when she finally said, "If that traitorous piece of triufais (5) is nothing but a myth, Highlander, then surely I am the stuff of legend."

TBC

(1) "Màthair" is "mother" in Scottish Gaelic, Duncan's native tongue.

(2) The woman says, "Oh, yes, Duncan Macleod, I speak Scottish Gaelic," (in Scottish Gaelic) "And a little bit of broad Scots, too" (lowland Scots, a Germanic language spoken in Southern Scotland). Longshanks was King Edward I of England. Born, 17 June 1239. He became King at the death of Henry III, 16 November 1272, but wasn't crowned until he returned from his crusade to the Holy Land on 19 August 1274. Died, 7 July 1307. Toom Tabard is literally "empty shirt". John Balliol, King of Scots from 1292 to 1296 was named King of Scotland by Longshanks who had been asked by the Scottish nobles to settle the succession dispute known as the Great Cause which arose when Scottish King Alexander III died with no immediate heir and his granddaughter, Margaret, the Maid of Norway, fell ill and died on her voyage from Norway to Scotland. Edward treated Scotland as a vassal state and humiliated and undermined John Balliol until his nobles, fed up with their weak king, appointed a council of twelve who formed the Auld Alliance, a treaty of mutual assistance, with France. In retaliation, Edward invaded Scotland, the Scots were defeated at Dunbar, and John Balliol abdicated less than four years after his coronation. He died in November of 1314 at his family's chateau in France.

(3) "Gàrderch" is "bastard" in the mystery woman's native tongue.

(4) Lucius means "light", as in the light of knowledge. A cut scene from the episode "Comes a Horseman" has Methos telling Kronos that he wants to be a scholar. Juventius means "youthful", for as an Immortal, he will always be youthful. Quietus means, among other things, "quiet", "calm", and "neutral", which I think Methos often tries to be, but with Macleod as a conscience, he can't help but take sides and care about how things turn out. It also means "death", a fitting reflection of his Horsemen association. A "vicarius" is a deputy to a Roman official. Remus is documented in both The Watcher Chronicles CD and in the novel Zealot. Death was the rider on the pale horse in the Book of Revelation in the Bible and the role Methos played in the Horsemen.

(5) "Triufais"means "filth" in the mystery woman's native tongue.

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