Author's Note:
Howdy, I'm back! Sorry for being AWOL for a while, the last couple of weeks have been pretty full on. However, I'm back now. So any PMs or review replies or reading chapters I have yet to catch up on will be dealt with shortly, I promise.
Thanks very much for the reviewers on the previous chapter: MayFairy, MountainLord-92, irishartemis, TheWritingKat, BeautifulSpace (x 3), EmmaMarie, silentnight, Celestial Valkyrie, KlinicallyInsaneKoschei, Lost moon, Ahsilaa, sailormajinmoon, Theta'sWorstNightmare, Geraldine, lookofwater, JessieDear13, meloyelow123, Imorgen, rosalina, EDZEL2, Lillyrose and jg.
To beautifulspace - Thank you very much for your 'fan-girling' and your reviews, LOL.
To silentnight - Well, here is Chapter 20 at last. Not sure it will answer any of your questions just yet, but hopefully you will enjoy anyway. XXX
To Lost Moon - I'm afraid you may have to wait a little longer to find out what happens at the ball, but it's definitely coming.
To Geraldine - As above, the stuff about the ball is coming, but not quite yet :) Thanks for your review.
To Rosalina - Thanks for catching up and reviewing, much appreciated.
To Lillyrose and jg - Always exciting to have some new reviewers, very glad you are both enjoying it so far.
Enormous wave to MountainLord-92, who was my 3,000th reviewer since publishing the original "One Moment in Time" story back in May 2010. Thank you very much to anyone who has ever reviewed and formed part of that total. I love you all.
- CHAPTER TWENTY -
"It all goes back...to our mothers and fathers, and theirs before them. We are puppets dancing on the strings of those who came before us, and one day our own children will take up our strings and dance in our stead."
- Tyrion Lannister, A Song of Ice and Fire
Little Amelia Pond blinked. She felt almost as if she had been asleep. But that couldn't be right, because she was standing up. And you couldn't go to sleep standing up, could you? That would just be silly.
She looked around. She was in a large, dimly-lit room she didn't immediately recognise. Perhaps this was a dream. It didn't feel like a dream though. There was an odd, scared feeling in the pit of her stomach that made it seem much more like a nightmare.
"Are you all right, kid?" a voice suddenly asked, making her jump.
Turning, she saw a woman with long red hair standing nearby. Behind her, there was an enormous grey cube with strange markings on the sides. No openings were visible anywhere. For some reason, that fact really bothered Amelia. The scared feeling inside her stomach grew even bigger. It was as if she had seen the mysterious big box before, only then it had been open...and something bad had been inside...
Struggling to remember, she returned her attention to the red-headed woman. "Where are we?"
"The National Museum, I think," the woman responded. She looked almost as dazed and disoriented as Amelia felt, as though someone had just snapped their fingers in her face and woken her from a deep sleep. "I was here once when I was a little..." She broke off abruptly, her eyes zeroing in on Amelia. "Yeah, complicated."
The National Museum, Amelia thought. Wait a minute, she remembered that. This wasn't a dream after all. That big box was named the Pandorica. There had been a note about it under the door and she had come here with Aunt Sharon to see it, hadn't she? And then she had hidden and waited for everyone to leave. How had she forgotten that? She could remember touching the Pandorica and this woman coming out of it. And then...and then... She scowled, trying to force herself to remember. But no matter how much she racked her brains, she couldn't recall what had come next. This woman had been inside the Pandorica, but she wasn't the bad thing...there had been something else.
"Who are you?" she demanded, determined not to show how frightened she was.
"It's a long story," the woman replied in a preoccupied voice. Her eyes had shifted beyond Amelia and had locked on to an information panel on the wall, which displayed the two thousand year history of the Pandorica pictorially, in the form of a timeline. "Ohhhh... a very long story."
She pressed a button on the wall. A large screen lit up with a video presentation, showing pictures of a uniformed Roman soldier standing guard beside the Pandorica, complete with a recorded commentary in a nasal, male voice. "The Lone Centurion. He appears as an iconic image in the artwork of many cultures, and there are several documented accounts of his appearances and his warnings to the many who attempted to open the box before its time. His last recorded appearance was during the London blitz in 1941. The warehouse where the Pandorica was stored was destroyed by incendiary bombs, but the box itself was found the next morning, a safe distance from the blaze. There are eyewitness accounts from the night of the fire of a figure in Roman dress, carrying the box from the flames."
The screen showed an artist's impression of a Roman soldier dragging the Pandorica out of the heart of a fiery inferno. The woman stared at the screen, obviously transfixed by what the commentator was saying. Amelia looked at her face curiously. She had gone very pale and there were tears slowly falling down her cheeks. "Rory," she moaned in an anguished voice. "Oh, Rory!"
Amelia started at the familiar name. Rory! She had a friend at school called Rory. Her best friend, actually. She stared hard at the stylised pictures on the screen. Had this Lone Centurion guy been called Rory too? It seemed like a funny sort of a name for a Roman, especially one that had been so heroic. She couldn't imagine her Rory doing something heroic and romantic like saving anyone from a raging fire. He was only a school-kid, and pretty weedy into the bargain, not much better than a girl, really. She could beat him in a fight with one hand tied behind her back. If he saw a fire, she thought he'd be much more likely to run away crying than to drag anything to safety.
"Since then," the commentary continued, "There have been no sightings of the Lone Centurion, and many have speculated that - if he ever existed - he perished in the fires of that night, performing one last act of devotion to the box he had pledged to protect for nearly 2,000 years."
The woman from the Pandorica was crying in earnest now, tears pouring down her face. She certainly seemed very upset that her Rory might be dead. Amelia wondered if he had been her boyfriend or husband or something. She was about to ask when there was a sudden flash of light and two men appeared out of nowhere, in the middle of the room, just like magic. One was quite young-looking, with floppy brown hair and nice, blueish-green eyes. He was dressed in a fusty old jacket, with a maroon bow tie and old-fashioned braces. The other man was older, tall and well-built, wearing a bright red jacket with dark jeans and high, leather boots. He had a hard, watchful face, and little Amelia thought he looked extremely dangerous.
The red-headed woman's face lit up in joy. "Doctor!" she cried, throwing herself into the arms of the young man with the bow tie. "Am I glad to see you!"
"Amy! You're all right!" the Doctor responded, enthusiastically returning her hug. Then his eyes fell on Amelia and he gave a funny grimace. "Ah! Two of you. Complicated."
Confused, Amelia turned and looked behind her, but there was no-one else there. She wasn't quite sure what this Doctor meant about there being two of the woman called Amy, but right now, in this crazy, magical place, nothing would have surprised her, even a second red-headed woman standing behind her.
The man in the red jacket swaggered forwards, looking Amy up and down with evident interest. "Don't I get a hug too?" he asked in a suggestive voice, his arms stretched wide and his tone layered with mockery.
In return, Amy impaled him with a frosty look that clearly said she wasn't in the mood for any jokes. "Who the hell are you?"
"He's a friend of mine," the Doctor said hurriedly. "Sort of, anyway. Captain John Hart, this is Amy and Amelia. Ladies, Captain John Hart."
Hart gave them both a wolfish grin. "The pleasure is all mine, ladies, I assure you."
Despite the aura of danger that still swirled around him, he was very charming, and Amelia couldn't help smiling back. But Amy ignored him and gripped the Doctor's arm urgently. "What happened to Rory? I remember...there was a gun, it came out of his hand! And that information video said he stayed with the Pandorica wherever it went, guarding it for nearly two thousand years! How could he possibly live that long?"
The Doctor sighed. "Because he's not really Rory, that's how."
"Yes, he is! What are you saying? Of course he is!" she insisted.
"No. He's a Nestene duplicate. A sentient android made out of plastic. All the Romans at Stonehenge were androids, put there by my enemies to help trap me inside the Pandorica. They were nothing but constructs, drawn from your memories to create a scenario I would find believable."
"No...I spoke to him...I touched him!"
"When the real Rory was killed by the Silurians, he fell into a crack in the Universe and he became one of the Neverwere. But I'm starting to think all the cracks are linked, across time and space. And you've been living for years with one in your bedroom wall. Ever since you were a little girl, untold waves of antilositic energy pouring out and flowing directly through your dreams, infiltrating and conditioning your brain, effectively converting you into a living, breathing temporal storage device. I think, when the Nestene stole the memories of Rory from your mind, they got more than they bargained for – they got his heart and mind and soul as well."
"What, like Pinocchio becoming a real boy?" Amy asked sceptically. "I stored the memory of him and made him real, is that what you're trying to say?"
"In a way, yes," the Doctor agreed. "The real Rory's soul inside a plastic body."
"But that video presentation said there's been no sightings of him since 1945! What happened to him?"
The Doctor stepped across to the screen, looking closely at the picture of the centurion dragging the Pandorica from the flames. "Like I said, he was made of plastic, Amy," he told her gently. "I warned him to stay away from fire, but..."
She shook her head, a mutinous expression on her tear-stained face. "No. No, I won't believe that. I can't."
The Doctor patted her on the shoulder reassuringly. "We don't know anything for sure, yet," he said. "But we'll do our utmost to find out what happened to him, I promise!"
Captain Hart's eyebrows rose inquiringly. "We?" he cut in, apparently unmoved by Amy's anguish. "I sincerely hope you're not including me in that."
The Doctor glared at him. "As a matter of fact, yeah, I was."
"Oh right, now I understand the problem!" Hart nodded sagely to himself. "You've obviously got me confused with someone who gives a shit. Well, I've got news for you, Doc. I couldn't care less about what happened to your Roman buddy during the last two thousand years. The important thing is, what happened to Evil Twin of Blondie?"
The Doctor's glare became even more pronounced. However, it appeared he was wasting his time. Hart merely returned his stare, with the air of one who was well used to being glared at and had long since ceased to care. Watching from the sidelines, Amelia felt impressed, wondering if she could manage to pull off that same bad-ass look the next time Aunt Sharon glared at her.
Giving up, the Doctor turned back to Amy. "Now, listen to me, Pond, this is very important. I left you a psychic message about the Chaos-Master, the creature that looks like the Master but isn't. He was inside the Pandorica with you. Is he still safely locked in there?"
"Of course," Amy shrugged calmly. "I closed the door again as soon as I got out, just like you told me."
Amelia's head shot up at this. None of them were paying the slightest bit of attention to her, so she had shrewdly been keeping quiet and doing her best to keep up with the conversation. Every kid knew that the most interesting stuff got said when the adults forgot you were in the room, stuff that you would never find out about otherwise. And even though a lot of their exchange had gone right over her head – particularly when it came to that Doctor bloke, who seemed to have swallowed a dictionary or something – something twitched in the back of her brain, like a worm wriggling on the end of a hook, some sixth sense screaming out to her that Amy was lying and that there was something she should be remembering, something important...
But before she could think what it was, or even mention it to the adults, a movement in the shadows caught her eye. Something was skirting along the wall just beyond the Pandorica, near the doorway leading into the next gallery. Curiously, Amelia stared at it, trying to make it out. Whatever it was, it wasn't very tall and it had an ungainly sort of gait, almost like a waddle.
The Doctor was frowning at Amy. "He didn't say anything to you?"
"No, nothing. He didn't even move."
There was more than one of them. As they came closer to the light, Amelia could see four or five heads bobbing along. Nervous now, she moved closer to the Doctor and tugged at his jacket. But the Doctor just kept on talking, without looking down. Amelia was beginning to wonder if he ever stopped.
"He must still be in his suspension trance," he said to John Hart. "Satisfied now?"
Hart gave him an arrogant smirk. "Doc, if you knew me at all, you'd know I'm never satisfied!"
Amelia pulled even more frantically on the Doctor's jacket. "What's that?" she asked.
At last, he glanced down, his gaze following her pointing finger to the small shapes waddling out of the shadows. "Adélie penguin," he answered absently, his thoughts obviously elsewhere, his eyes returning to fix on the Pandorica. "Pygoscelis adeliae. Very common along the Antarctic coast."
"But we're not on the Antarctic coast!" Amelia said worriedly, tugging at him again. "We're in a museum."
"Yes," he agreed. "The National Mus..." He broke off suddenly and whirled around. "What did you say?"
"I said, we're in a museum!"
"Of course we're in a museum!" he snapped. "And there shouldn't be live penguins wandering around in a museum!"
Faster than lightning, John Hart drew a gun from the holster on his hip and aimed it squarely at the doorway.
"Don't you dare shoot them, Hart!" the Doctor ordered angrily. "They're only penguins, for Rassilon's sake!"
"I'm not a big fan of penguins," Hart said. "They remind me too much of tiny nuns. But actually, it's not the penguins I'm worried about, Doc. It's more the polar bear coming behind them!"
And sure enough, right at that moment, a huge white, shaggy form shuffled through the doorway towards them with a deafening roar.
Trying her best to bottle up her apprehension, Tejana made her way through the corridors to the Infirmary. It wasn't a particularly large part of the Academy, located well away from the dormitories and lecture halls and recreation areas that made up the majority of the buildings. It wasn't required all that often. Time Lords hardly ever got sick, and when they did, they tended to heal very quickly. However, Tejana could remember visiting it herself a few times, usually accompanying Damon, when he went to get patched up after whatever latest fight his hot-headedness had gotten him into.
The facility was made up of two sections. The first room was effectively a clinic, with a med-tech on full time duty. Most patients were able to be dealt with in this section, quickly and efficiently, with little fuss. This was the room she was familiar with.
However, beyond that was a ward, where the more serious cases were placed. Tejana had never been in there. As far as she knew, it was very rarely used. She suspected that it had never before been called upon to simultaneously house two such high-profile students as the son of the Lord President and the heir of Oakdown.
As she approached the entrance to the clinic, she rehearsed in her head what she would say to the med-tech on duty. Somehow she didn't think the chances of a Shabogan servant girl getting in to see Lord Koschei Oakdown without an argument were all that good, even if he had asked for her. Particularly since it was a bunch of Shabogan rough-necks that had put him in the hospital in the first place.
As it happened, she needn't have worried. The desk where the med-tech usually sat was unoccupied. Tejana walked quietly into the room. Voices were coming from one of the nearby examination cubicles.
"Will you please sit still, Lord Drax?" came an impatient female voice. "How can I possibly pull it out when you're wriggling around all over the place?"
"Ow, it hurts," moaned a familiar male voice. "Not to mention being incredibly embarrassing."
"Well, you won't get much sympathy from me! All this over such a silly thing! It was only a chicken, for heaven's sake."
"Tell that to Gomer," Drax retorted sarcastically. "No, on second thoughts, don't bother, because I tried that, and it didn't work! Ow, ow, ow! I'm not sure I'll ever be able to sit down again!"
The med-tech gave an unimpressed snort. "Oh, stop grizzling like a baby!"
"OUCH! You did that on purpose!" Drax howled indignantly.
As she crept silently past the curtained cubicle, Tejana couldn't help giving a small smile, despite the seriousness of her own mission. Whatever scrape Drax had tumbled into this time, it sounded like a real doozy. If she had wanted to, she could have stuck her head around the curtain and reassured him that, in time, he would definitely be able to sit down again. Well enough to command a bow-ship in the Time War, anyway. At this sobering thought, the smile on her face fell away, her eyes shadowed with the harrowing memory of his tragic death.
Don't think about it, she told herself as she slipped unseen into the ward beyond. Just don't think about it.
The long room was still and quiet. Only two of the beds were occupied. The one nearest to the door was surrounded by a plethora of sophisticated monitoring equipment, softly beeping and whirring in the silence. Anzor lay against the pillows, his eyes closed, his face contorted in a frozen mask of fear and agony. He scarcely seemed to be breathing, his respiration so shallow that his chest hardly appeared to rise and fall.
Tejana's eyes slid over him with a shudder of revulsion, reliving the disgusting feeling of his aroused body crushing her into the floor. She wondered what terrifying nightmares he was experiencing inside his head. Anzor was one of the most twisted and evil individuals she had ever had the misfortune to come across. While she would never agree with the Master's ruthless and violent way of dealing with threats to her safety, she couldn't regret what he had done this time.
The second bed was some distance away, right at the end of the room. This patient wasn't much more than a lump under the bedclothes, his back to the rest of the ward. But Tejana didn't need to be told to know it had to be Koschei.
The only other person in the room was an attendant hovering near the side of Anzor's bed. Judging by her attire, she was not a med-tech, but merely one of the servants responsible for doing the menial chores around the Infirmary. She wore a serviceable woollen gown, identical to the one Tejana had on, except that hers was cream-coloured instead of black. She had obviously just finished changing Anzor's bed-linen, because she was in the process of folding up some sheets and thrusting them into a hamper.
As Tejana entered, she turned around. She was small and plump, with a mass of dark brown curly hair and a face that would have been pretty, if it wasn't for a scar that disfigured her right cheek. As soon as she caught sight of Tejana, she smiled, her face lighting up in welcome. "Kat!"
Tejana frowned, her body tensing in suspicion. She was sure she had never seen this girl before. "How do you know my name?"
The girl's expression became serious once more. "All the servants know your name," she said. "Especially those of us who were also victims of Lord Anzor."
So much for staying under the radar, Tejana sighed to herself. I'm no better at it than the Doctor is.
"You were one of his victims?" she asked aloud.
"Yes. My name is Salome," the girl replied. Her hand went to her face, her fingers lightly tracing over the ugly, raised scar. "He did this to me. It was some kind of rare acid. The med-techs couldn't do anything. It never healed."
Tejana stared at her in pity, trying to imagine what it would be like to look in the mirror and to see such a gruesome reminder of Anzor every single day. "I'm so sorry," she murmured, not knowing what else to say.
"Don't be," Salome said, her eyes glittering with remembered pain. "No-one could stop him until you came. No-one could make him pay. But we've all heard of the Shabogan witch-women. We all know what you are and what you did. Now justice has been served and all the servants owe you a debt that can never be repaid."
"None of you owe me anything," Tejana answered, even though she knew by the expression on the other girl's face that she was wasting her breath trying to convince Salome she hadn't done anything to Anzor, just as she had been wasting her breath trying to convince Dyoni. She looked incredulously at the pile of soiled sheets in Salome's arms. "But surely, knowing you were one of his victims, they don't allow you in here to tend him?"
Salome gave her a smile that was both fierce and bitter. "This assignment is Fionnula's gift to me, her way of balancing the scales." Then, at the concerned look on Tejana's face, she quickly added, "Oh, don't worry – I would not risk your anger by adding to his punishment. He is safe enough from me. It's sufficient for me to come here every day and see him like this. I speak to him – I whisper in his ear. I tell him that he has no hope, that he will be like this, a drooling vegetable, for the rest of his miserable life. And I pray to all the gods that he hears me."
The hatred in her voice was so potent as to be almost tangible, coupled with a terrible, triumphant satisfaction. Hearing the aching bitterness, recognising it for what it was, Tejana suddenly felt as old as the Mountains of Solace and Solitude. She wished she had the words to make the girl understand that the only person she was harming by hanging on so tightly to her anguish was herself. But she knew from her own life that once you had experienced that sort of pain and loss, words were the one thing that could never help. She had been through the same thing, during the Time War, embracing the rage and hate and the desire for revenge, until it had all become an indelible part of her. The only way to win out over the darkness was to fight it yourself, in your own way, through to the very end. And sometimes, even then, even when you thought you'd finally won and put it all safely in the past, you'd find that you needed to start from the beginning and fight it all over again. Ultimately, it was a battle you needed to win or lose on your own. Nobody else could do it for you, no matter how much they wanted to.
Her eyes drifted to the still figure in the bed at the end of the ward, both her hearts contracting in anger and sorrow. She would give everything she had to take from Koschei Oakdown the pain and betrayal he was feeling right now. There was nothing she wanted more in the world than to win this battle for him, to spare him the centuries of rage and loneliness and insanity that were coming for him. But she couldn't do it, not without making everything worse. Not until - far, far in the future - she met him in the Matrix and learned to love the man behind the monster.
"I'm here to see Lord Koschei," she said softly to Salome. "How is he?"
"Physically, he's healing well," Salome replied. "He's young and strong, with a Time Lord physiology. The tissue rectifier has already repaired most of the serious damage. I'm guessing that, by Otherstide, there won't be a scratch on him."
The calm reply struck Tejana as odd. Salome didn't seem at all surprised to hear that a Shabogan servant girl had sneaked into the Infirmary to visit the injured heir of Oakdown, despite the significant breach in Gallifreyan social proprieties. Tejana couldn't help wondering uneasily just what sort of salacious gossip had been flying around the servant hall concerning her and Koschei and Theta.
"You said physically he's healing well. What about...mentally?"
Salome averted her eyes and fiddled nervously with the hem of the sheet she was holding. "That's not for me to say."
Tejana reached out and caught her hand, stilling her fingers with her own. "Salome, please. Tell me."
The girl looked up, a troubled expression on her face, and Tejana nodded encouragingly.
"I...it's just...Lord Oakdown was here earlier, to see him."
"And?"
"And...he shouted at Lord Koschei...a lot. He said...some terrible things."
A cold feeling of apprehension trickled down the back of Tejana's neck. "And what did Lord Koschei do?"
"That's just it. He didn't do anything. He just stared at the wall, as if he couldn't even hear his father, as if Lord Oakdown wasn't even there," Salome replied. "It was a bit...creepy, really. And Lord Oakdown just got angrier and angrier, because Lord Koschei wouldn't answer him."
"What happened then?"
"Lord Oakdown started to hit Lord Koschei, only the med-tech stopped him. It was awful!" Salome explained, her eyes wide at the memory. "I thought for a moment Lord Oakdown was going to hit the med-tech too, but he stormed out in a fury instead. Lord Koschei didn't even move. Then Lord Theta came in and tried to get him to talk, but I don't think he had any success either and he left."
A lump rose in Tejana's throat as she visualised the terrible, one-sided confrontation. No wonder the Master never wanted to talk about his childhood. She had thought she understood, but the reality was so much worse than she ever could have imagined. "And now?"
"He's sleeping now, I think. Poor thing, it will probably do him good," Salome told her. "He's very handsome, isn't he?"
"Oh, yes," Tejana replied with a faint smile. She had never heard anyone refer to the Master as a 'poor thing' before, especially in such a sympathetic voice, but she supposed there was a first time for everything. "Oh yes, he certainly is. Thank you, Salome."
With that, she turned her back on the servant girl and walked the length of the room to the bed at the end. The distance seemed to stretch on and on for ever. She wasn't even quite sure why she had come, it was only asking for trouble – trouble she could ill afford. But he was in pain and he had asked for her, two things she could now never refuse when it came to the Master, no matter which incarnation of him it was.
She drew near to the side of his bed and looked down at him. Like Anzor, he was lying with his eyes closed. His handsome features were mottled with a horrifying array of half-healed cuts and contusions. It looked as though his nose and possibly his left cheek-bone had been broken and expertly re-set by the med-techs. They had begun to heal rapidly, but were still blackened and swollen. Her hearts turned over in compassion at the sight of him, hating to think what other injuries lay concealed under his blankets. Kelios and his friends had definitely been playing for keeps.
She knelt down beside the bed, her eyes trailing over his face in reluctant fascination. Beneath the bruises, he looked so young, so vulnerable – not much more than a boy, unmarked by time and hatred and hardship. So different to the hard, ruthless man who had ended up becoming her life-mate and the father of her child. Gently, she reached out and pulled the covers up and settled them more comfortably around his shoulders. He lay as still as a stone, without stirring in the slightest. She hesitated for a moment. Then, unable to resist the temptation, she stroked her fingers lovingly over his brow, smoothing the soft, tousled dark hair back from his forehead.
Suddenly, shockingly, with the speed of a striking snake, his hand flew up and fastened around her wrist in an iron grip. It was the same wrist Theta had twisted and bruised earlier and she gasped in surprise and pain. His eyes flicked open and glared up at her, glittering like dark sapphires.
"Such a tender touch!" he snarled. "I could almost believe that you mean it, Kat."
Tejana took a deep breath, trying to get her startled heart-rate back under control. "What makes you so sure that I don't?"
His eyes narrowed, fury blazing in the blue depths. "Because you're a Shabogan. An animal," he said coldly and cruelly. "And animals don't have feelings."
Even though she wasn't what he accused her of, hurt lanced through her at the deliberate malice in his expression. The grip on her wrist tightened even further, crushing her delicate bones, intentionally trying to cause her pain. Her immediate instinct was to struggle. But one of the very first things she had learnt about the Master, very early on in her life, was that panicked resistance only increased his pleasure, inciting him to even further acts of violence. So instead of fighting his grip, she raised her chin proudly and forced herself to remain still, refusing to give him the satisfaction of knowing he was hurting her.
"Now you sound like him," she said, flicking her eyes towards Anzor's bed. "Just before he tried to rape me, he told me that I was an animal and that was why he had the right to hurt me."
"Yeah? Well, maybe he had the right idea after all!"
Tejana met his gaze challengingly. "Is that what you truly believe, Lord Koschei?"
For a moment, he stared angrily back at her, their eyes locked in a silent, powerful confrontation. Then his fingers loosened, contemptuously allowing her hand to fall away, as if she was a toy he had grown tired of playing with. "No. I don't."
Stifling a deep hiss of relief, Tejana surreptitiously tried to massage some feeling back into her aching wrist. "Lord Theta told me you wanted to see me," she said, doing her best to keep her voice from trembling.
He gave a sharp, sarcastic bark of laughter. "Oh, I bet he did. And I bet he told you a few other things too, didn't he? About what happened in Low Town, for instance?" Moving abruptly, he propped himself up on one elbow so that their faces were level. "Then again," he sneered. "Maybe you already knew. Tell me about the Shabogan known as Kelios, Kat. And don't bother to pretend you don't know what I'm talking about."
"Kelios is...the son of Aminestra, the last descendant of the Pythia," she said hesitantly, unsure what he wanted from her.
"And?" he growled.
"And...he's also the bastard son of your father, Lord Oakdown. Which makes him your older half-brother."
His eyes were merciless, boring into her, demanding more. "And?"
"And..." she faltered. "And...I don't know what else you want me to say."
Again his hand shot out, this time tangling fiercely in her hair. "I want you to tell me what he is to you."
"To...me?" she gritted out. "He's nothing to me."
"Oh, come on, Kat," he said bitterly. "Why don't you just say it? Am I supposed to believe that you turned up here at the Academy and crossed my path by coincidence? You're good, sweetheart, but you're not that good. Twice now, when I've been near you, I've blacked out and lost whole chunks of time. And you told me yourself about your lover back in Low Town. The reason you couldn't give yourself to me. A man who wasn't good and never would be, remember?"
"You think the man I'm promised to is your half-brother?" Tejana exclaimed incredulously. "You think I'm part of some sort of trap he's laid for you?"
His bruised face twisted in contempt. "Aren't you? Your hair, your lips, your body...everything about you, designed to make me want you. You're the ultimate trap and he knew it when he sent you here. The only question is, what you're trying to achieve. Are you merely a spy or does he have some other plan for you?"
"He doesn't have any plan for me because he doesn't know anything about me! He had nothing to do with me coming here!" Tejana snapped, her eyes flashing furiously. "And let me tell you, Koschei Oakdown, that bastard is one of the last people in the Universe I would ever promise myself to!"
"Then who are you promised to?" Koschei demanded. "If you're telling the truth, if it's not Kelios, then tell me his name!"
"I can't!"
His hand yanked savagely at her hair, nearly pulling it out by the roots. "Tell me his name!"
Tejana nearly screamed in pain, stars dancing before her eyes. Her scalp felt like it was on fire. It had been a long time since the Master had hurt her like this, not since the Year That Never Was, when he had back-handed her into the ground. All at once she was reminded all too clearly just how dangerous he could be.
"TELL ME!"
"Harold Saxon!" she spat, recalling a similar fury written across his face, back on board the Valiant, the day he had hit her. He's not a good man and never will be. "His name is Harold Saxon!"
The hand in her hair eased as he considered her response. "Harold Saxon?" he repeated. "What the hell kind of name is that? It doesn't even sound Gallifreyan."
Taking advantage of his inattention, she pulled back out of his reach, furious tears stinging her eyes. "It's the name of the man I'm promised to." One of them, anyway. "You asked me and I told you. Not that you have any right to know. But it's the truth, just like it's the truth that I have never had anything to do with Kelios, son of Aminestra." Shakily, she got to her feet. "And now, I'm leaving. I came here because I thought you needed me. Obviously I was wrong. All you want is a punching bag to take your problems out on. And that's one thing I'll never be."
With that, she turned angrily to leave, her head held high.
"Wait!" he said tightly. "Kat...I'm sorry. Don't go."
Against her better judgement, she paused. Caught by the pain in his voice, she looked back at him, wary of his talent for manipulation and determined not to fall for any of his tricks. "Why should I stay? So you can hurt me again? Or maybe call me some more disgusting names?"
"No, because you were right. I do need you. Please."
There was a strange, almost empty look on his face. But his eyes burned so intensely that it was uncomfortable to see. Slowly, reluctantly, Tejana retraced her steps until she stood back beside the bed. He didn't try to touch her again. Instead, his gaze rested on her face almost hungrily.
"When I blacked out in the ballroom...were we doing what I think we were doing?"
Tejana flushed, the hot colour flooding her cheeks. He might not remember what had happened, but she did, every last heated, erotic detail. "Yes."
"And was it good between us?"
Her colour deepened still further. But she stubbornly refused to drop her eyes. "Yes, it was good."
"I can't believe I missed the whole thing." He smiled mirthlessly. "I wanted you the first time I saw you, you know, that night in the Refectory. You walked towards our table and all I could think about was how good it would feel to throw you down beneath me, and to take you, hot and hard, and to hell with everybody else in the room. But I told myself I could never have you. Do you know why?"
She shook her head. "No."
"Because of who I am," he snarled. "The heir of Oakdown." His tone dripped sarcasm and pain. "I couldn't possibly shame my House...my father...by consorting with a lowlife Shabogan, no matter how beautiful you were. Do you even understand how ironic that was, Kat? Do you?"
Tejana's eyes brimmed with tears. She sat down on the side of the bed and took his clenched hand in hers, tracing her fingers over the scabbed and bruised knuckles. "Koschei..."
He didn't even seem to notice. He was far too immersed in his own world of hurt and betrayal. "All those years, ever since I was a child, all he ever talked about was duty. How the honour of the family was everything. How I had to try harder, be the best, to uphold the honour of the House of Oakdown. Nothing I've ever done has been good enough for him, no matter how hard I tried. There's never been any love, never any affection or pride in what I achieved, just complaint after complaint, punishment after punishment. And all that time...all that time he was breaking every single one of his own rules, him and his Shabogan whore and his bastard son!"
All at once, he began to laugh, a strange, cracked, bitter laughter, complete devoid of amusement. "Oh, it's funny! Don't you think so, Kat? So...very...goddamn...funny!"
And then she realised he wasn't laughing at all, but crying – terrible, dry, rasping sobs that ripped through him, tearing him apart from the inside out.
Her resolve to keep her distance shattered into a million pieces. He was so young and this was only the beginning - he had so much yet to go through, so much yet to suffer. Unable to bear the sound of his grief, she climbed up on to the bed beside him and took him into her arms, holding him as tightly as she could, both her hearts aching for him. His first reaction was to resist, stiffening his body against her, trying to push her away. But she didn't let go. Instead, she held him even more closely, cradling his head against her shoulder and stroking his dark hair. Little by little, he relaxed against her, wrapping his arms around her and accepting her comfort, still crying as she rocked him back and forth and shushed him like a child.
Gradually, as the long minutes passed, the devastating sobs that wracked his body eased, and all she could hear was the uneven, traumatised sound of his breathing.
And then, at last he spoke, his voice harsh and venomous, words that sent a prophetic shiver up her spine.
"I swear to you, Kat, on my own life, that hypocritical son-of-a-bitch will never tell me what to do again! From now on, Koschei Oakdown will be his own master!"
Another Author's Note:
And there it is, Koschei Oakdown's first step in becoming the Master. Next chapter should cover the Otherstide Ball, if all goes to plan.
I'd like to take this opportunity to wish everybody a merry Christmas and a happy and safe New Year. XOXO