The Contestants Ch. 01

Anna couldn't sleep that night but kept thinking of all aspects of the little entry. "So those who willfully sent others across the Border — be it loved ones or enemies — were given a chance to undo their acts." In the early morning hours, she got up and went to the Border. She had visited it in Gareth's company many times, so she knew where to find the shortcuts, but it was a rather long time since she had been there, and she needed to see it again in the light of her new knowledge.

She soon found that she wasn't alone because a young girl was running around in there trying in vain to find her way out. Anna's stomach turned when she saw the anguish of the other, and she couldn't help picturing her mother trapped in this awful place like a fly on flypaper. Anna fled from the darkness and hoped fretfully that she wouldn't meet Conaill or any of the guards; she wouldn't manage that just right now.

Instead, she ran away to the city in a hurry, desperately needing Celia's company.

**********

New Orleans in the fall of 1814 was a city seething with unrest and rumors. The ongoing war against the British created a situation that was very precarious. Nobody knew with certainty how far the British fleet had advanced. Some said that it was anchored off Lake Borgne already, and some said it would take days before it would be sighted in the Gulf. Soldiers and fortune seekers had poured into town, and citizens of means debated the issue concerning the defense of the city heatedly. Some thought it better to give the town up to the enemy rather than have it ransacked, and others pledged that they would defend it street by street if necessary. General Andrew Jackson had arrived on the scene and was trying hard to make an army out of the scattered and unkempt forces that were at his disposal.

Anna had put on a plain dress and hid her hair under a hat so as not to draw attention to herself, and she was running quickly through the streets, taking care not to be caught in the crowd. Twice she had to cross the street to get out of the way of the soldiers, who were swarming all over the sidewalks, and she planned to enter the brothel from the kitchen side the way she had done it so many times before. To reach the small staircase that led into the attic, where Celia's room was situated, this was the easiest approach, but when she turned the corner, she froze and looked alarmed at the spectacle in front of her. The house was on fire and girls, servants, and customers were running around the place screaming. She couldn't see Madame, and she couldn't see Celia among the servants. Although extremely frightened by now, she didn't hesitate a second but threw herself in the middle of the commotion, trying desperately to get a coherent word out of anyone. Nobody had seen Celia, and Anna was informed that the fire had begun when a couple of the soldiers had started fighting over a girl with one of the regular customers.

Coughing from the smoke and trying to shield her watery eyes, Anna searched among the bodies lying on the sidewalk and behind the house, and finally she recognized her badly burnt friend. Celia lay beside her employer, and Anna could see in an instant that Madame was dead. Beside the two bodies, one of the kitchen boys sat crying. Anna didn't know whether Celia was still alive or not but decided to get Celia out of the vicinity of the fire before doing anything else. Anna grabbed the boy by the shoulders and shook him lightly. When he looked up at her, she concentrated all the power she had learned to master during the past years into her eyes and bore her gaze into him.

"Help me move her," she whispered with a voice hoarse from the smoke. "We'll bring her over to that small shed in the garden, and then you will stay with her until I come back with more help. Do you understand? You shall stay with her!"

The young boy nodded slowly, mesmerized by her eyes, and then he lifted Celia in his arms and carried her to the shed. Anna watched in anguish. Celia seemed lifeless. If she wasn't already dead, she was most likely dying. When the boy had hidden with Celia in the shed, Anna started running towards the secret opening to Inis.

Inside the castle, she ran up the stairs to the Great Hall. She hadn't planned where she was going or whom to see, but when she stood outside the doors to the Council Room, she knew that she had to address Conaill as the matter concerned life or death. He was the only one, who could solve an issue of that magnitude. Without hesitation, she threw the big doors open to the Council Room and entered. Conaill was in session with the warlords, and they all fell immediately silent when they saw her. Her clothes were burned and disheveled. The fire had scorched her hair, and she bled from a small wound on her forehead. Yet she didn't seem to be aware of her appearance. When no one spoke a word, she hid her face in her hands and kneeled on the floor.

Conaill rose and with a gesture of his hand he motioned the council to leave the room and when they had left, and silence fell around them, she heard him say, "Get up from the floor. You are no servant in this place. Look at me and tell me what has happened!"

Yet, Anna didn't get up from the floor. Instead, she crawled over to his feet and put her head against them.

"Please, save her for me," she whispered, "I'll do anything for you! You can turn me into a changeling if you like..."

"Rise!" he said in an even sterner voice and finally she got to her feet, and they stood looking at each other for what seemed an eternity, suspended in time.

They stood so close that she could almost feel his breath on her face, and their eyes were locked into each other's. It dawned upon her that this was the first time ever that he looked her into the eyes; that he looked at her at all — he, who had taken her away from her mother, who had threatened to turn her into a changeling, and who had ignored her since Eavan had forced him to let her remain a human. His face was so much harder and stronger than Gareth's, yet she saw traces of Gareth in him. His jaw was set and his savage mouth a thin line and she observed that his eyes were a steely grey with flecks of gold in them. It was in a way a forbidding face, and she wondered fleetingly if compassion could ever alter his features and bring softness to any part of it. Yet, surprisingly, he was the first one to turn down his gaze.

"So be it," he said in a lower voice. "I'll save her for you."

Anna felt her knees give away, and she took hold of his arm to steady herself. It was a strange feeling to experience that he was warm to the touch because it would have been more natural had he been icy cold. He caught her easily when she fell. She could have been made of feathers. At the same moment, she heard Gareth's voice as he entered the room.

"Leave this to me. I'll go! I know where the woman is."

"You have my permission," Conaill answered.

No one had asked for explanations, no one had mentioned any names, but between the two of them that wasn't necessary.

**********

When Anna regained consciousness she was in her own bed, and Eavan stood bent over her.

"Celia!" Anna cried out in anguish.

"Shh," Eavan interrupted her. "Gareth has brought the woman to the palace, and I will do what I can for her. She is alive but just barely. Stop thinking about her. She is in safe hands. Right now we have to take care of you. You are in an appalling shape, and I'm going to give you something to sleep on."

Eavan, who had a vast knowledge of healing, slipped a hand in under Anna's neck and lifted her head. She brought a glass to Anna's lips with a strong-smelling brew and made her drink it. Anna soon felt drowsy, and before she knew it, she had fallen asleep.

The days that followed were a hazy blur. Anna remembered only fractions. Once she became aware of that Gareth lifted her up and carried her to the sofa when her bed was made. A late night she clearly heard voices above her head — possibly Eavan's and her first sorcerer's.

"She will have to sleep just a little bit more to reduce the fever. She will have passed the crisis in a few days."

Anna surfaced to consciousness an early morning only to see a large shadow looming over her bed. The faint light from the window made it impossible for her to see the person clearly, but she divined that it was a man, and her fevered brain thought she recognized Conaill although she couldn't understand why he would be in her room at this hour.

"Conaill?" she whispered in a voice hardly audible, but the shadow didn't move or answer, and she soon fell asleep again.

Eventually, Anna recovered and as soon as she could stand on her feet she demanded to see Celia.

"Yes you may," Eavan said to her, "but you must remember that Celia is frail. She has large wounds, and she has lost a lot of blood. Then there is another matter. We have saved Celia's life, but none of us here is capable of giving life. We are no gods. The only way to save her was to prolong her life. She has the same status as you have now, and she will grow old together with you."

Eavan smiled and caressed Anna when she saw the light in Anna's eyes. "I know that you won't mind, but I suppose that you will have to break the news gently to Celia and wait until she is strong enough to accept the truth."

It wasn't so hard to tell Celia about her new life as Anna expected. When Celia could sit up in bed and talk to her, Anna told her in the gentlest possible way.

Celia merely smiled as if this was the most natural thing in the world. She took one of Anna's hands, kissed it, and said, "I belong to you now, My Precious! Of course, I shall always be with you."

Anna, however, was determined to arrange for that Celia should live in the city she was used to. It would be hard for her to adjust to the life of the palace, and in the end she would perhaps suffer from being cut off from everything that meant ordinary life to her. Anna also had a plan within the plan. She had already decided that she wanted a house in New Orleans, which could serve as a refuge when she wanted to be away from Inis for a while. Now she could start arranging for a home in the city for the two of them.

She got help from an unexpected source.

**********

One afternoon when Anna had retired to her rooms to alter some clothes to fit Celia — everything Celia had been wearing was destroyed by the fire — Conaill entered unannounced. He probably came from a ride because he was dressed in his old hunting costume in pure leather, which over the years had been honed down to the softest possible skin. Its color was today a mixture of brown and green and no one could really tell how it had looked in the beginning, but when he wore it, he could hide anywhere in the forest and blend into the background. His silvery white hair was tightly tied back with a small piece of leather and left his face bare. He brought with him a sense of the wild but also one of controlled power and calm. When he wetted his lips, his sharp teeth, almost looking like fangs, became barely visible. He cast a glance at her and greeted her formally. Then he went up to the window, his back towards her. Anna let her work rest in her lap and watched him, silently wondering with an uneasy feeling of dread what he might want of her. He had never before visited her in her room, or so she thought since she was still very uncertain about the shadow of a man she remembered from her fever nights.

"The woman Marie de Beauvoir — evidently he couldn't bring himself to say 'your mother' — is still alive, but she is not living any longer at the address you picked up in the Ledger in the Library," he said noncommittally.

Anna blushed furiously and hid her face in her hands although he hadn't turned around to look at her. What a fool she had been, thinking that she could keep her schemes in the Library a secret to him!

"After becoming a widow, she moved to a small property in the center of the town. She is poor and sickly after having lost her son to the malaria," he continued in the same even voice.

Anna looked up not believing her ears. In so many words, he was telling her of the deaths of her father and an unknown brother! She started rocking back and forth in agony, and she cried now, not trying to hide it from him. He finally turned around to face her. He didn't comment on her tears, and he didn't comfort her, but he approached her chair and slipped a large envelope into her lap.

"The house she is living in belongs to me," he said almost inaudibly, "and I'm giving it now to you."

She stopped crying instantly and turned her tear-stained face towards him, and they looked at each other again in silence for several minutes. Then he left the room without having uttered another word.

**********

It was with great apprehension Anna went to visit the house she now owned. Possibly she would also meet her mother — a meeting she had thought so much about for so long that when it was about to happen, she didn't have any feelings left of either rage or sorrow. She felt tired and empty instead, but she had however dressed up for the occasion in a flowing silk gown. When she arrived at the house, she found it to be a small, graceful townhouse very well situated in the center of the city. She thought instantly that Celia would be happy here and so would she be, later at least...

Anna knocked on the heavy door, and a maid let her in. She introduced herself as the new proprietor and informed the maid that she had come to call upon Madame de Beauvoir to discuss the new terms under which the lady in question would be allowed to continue to live in the house. The maid hardly dared to look at her, and evidently her arrival was known and dreaded. When she entered the living room on the ground floor, she saw a woman sitting in a wheelchair by the window. Her mother couldn't have been more than around fifty years old, yet she looked aged and ill. Anna stood still for a moment, thinking that this might have been her home.

"Good morning Mother," she said quietly.

The woman by the window gave a violent start and almost fell out of her chair. She stared in horror at Anna, and Anna could see disbelief and later recognition creep into her mind and eyes.

"You will never imagine how many times I have tried to visualize this meeting, and now I have no words left to say to you. The fact remains that you abandoned me when I was a baby infant and although you regretted your choice, you didn't manage to win me back. Somehow I understand that you must have had nightmares about this as long as I have."

"Yes," Anna continued thoughtfully, "I have wanted revenge, but it seems so futile now. The thing that grieves me the most is that I never got the possibility to get to know my father. He has died I understand." Anna fell silent, and her mother hadn't said a word.

"I will let you live in this house for as long as you need," Anna went on after a brief silence. "I have a few conditions though. A servant of mine needs a roof over her head so I want her to occupy the left wing of this house. If you leave from here before you die, I demand that you will see to that any family record still in your possession is handed over to me. When I move into this house, I will try to get to know as much about my family as possible. I realize that you find it impossible to talk to me today, but I will be back, and hopefully you will have recovered from the shock by then."

Then Anna left her stunned mother and went out in the fresh air again. She felt the emotional strain and started to shiver. The meeting had left a hard lump of pain in her chest, and she wondered if she could ever really forgive and go on.

There were other matters to settle this day, however, and Anna went to see a lawyer because she wanted to make her will although she had no idea of how long she would live. She wanted to make sure that Celia was provided for whatever might happen. She also paid a certain sum of money to the estate of the woman, known throughout New Orleans as "Madame," to obtain the legal ownership of Celia. At the same time, she signed a document that she would later give to Celia setting her free forever. When all this was done, Anna felt a great relief at last, and she observed as she walked through the streets that it was peaceful in the city and that each and everyone seemed to be rejoicing. She soon found out that a small army under General Andrew Jackson had won a great victory over an enemy vastly outnumbering the home forces in size and that the city and even the Union were saved hereby.

**********

When Anna returned to the castle, it was late at night and almost unnaturally quiet. She met no one apart from the guards by the door when she tiptoed up the stairs to the Great Hall on the second floor, having to cross this vast room to reach the staircase at the other end leading up to the private apartments. When she was halfway through the hall, the door to the nearby Council Room was suddenly opened. In the doorway, she saw a shadow of a man, and she knew instantly that it was Conaill standing there. The moonlight shone through the large windows in the room behind him, and she couldn't see his face. She froze to the floor, and her heart started to hammer against her ribcage. Then awareness hit her like a hard slap on the face. She knew suddenly without a doubt that he wanted her. Conaill didn't move and he didn't utter a word, yet she could feel his longing for her as something tangible touching her, and she began to tremble. A low moan escaped her, and she started to back towards the staircase. He remained standing motionless and silent in the doorway when she turned and rushed the last few steps to the stairs. When she reached her rooms at last, she fell to the floor and lay there for several minutes feeling the taste of blood in her mouth.

The next few days were an agony. Anna didn't know where to hide because she knew that doors didn't present an obstacle to Conaill. If he wanted to come to her room, he would turn up there no matter what means of magic she would use to try to stop him. Yet, she huddled in her room and in the Library not knowing of any other place where to go. She tried to shield as much of her thoughts as possible, thinking not only of Conaill but also of Gareth and most of all of Eavan. What would Eavan do if she knew?

Three nights later, she encountered him again. She had lingered in the Library, hating the thought of going to her rooms, the only available means of reaching them leading through the Great Hall. In the end, she was so tired that she almost stumbled and fell, and she had no option but to leave her hideaway. It was very dark outside, and she needed a light. She remembered she had seen some candles in the Orangery, the beautiful winter garden in glass, adjacent to the Library. She went there and roamed through the shelves when suddenly she became aware of his presence behind her back. She slowly turned and saw him standing not far away. This time he went up to her, but he still didn't talk. She stood rigid, clasping her hands behind her back, and he didn't take hold of her. Instead, he bent down towards her. Then she felt his lips cover hers, searchingly and surprisingly soft. He tasted of wild honey and something else that drove her mad. She couldn't help opening her mouth to him and let him enter it. He licked her lips and then he inserted his tongue into her mouth, and she sucked on it. He still didn't take her into his arms, and she still held on to her hands in a cramp behind her back. His kiss deepened, and she could feel his fangs when he pressed his teeth against hers. He bit her lips and drew blood, yet it didn't hurt. At last he broke the spell with a deep sigh, and she tore herself away sobbing and fled through the Library to her rooms.