The Silver Rose by Susan Carroll Page B

threatened to engulf her like a dark tide. Miri’s mind reeled, uncertain whether she wanted to fight or simply surrender, but once more Simon took the decision out of her hands.
    He thrust her away, ending the kiss as abruptly as he’d begun. His chest rising and falling, he stared at her as though seeking to imprint her image upon his mind. Then without another word, he flung open the door and disappeared beneath the curtain of driving rain.

Chapter Four
    T
HE STAIRCASE WOUND up and up into the clouds, the risers twisting and turning at mad angles. Miri trudged step after step, seeking to avoid trampling the lizards that darted about her feet. Sleek, slippery, and cold, the salamanders brushed against her ankles. Just as she despaired of ever reaching the top of the stair, she emerged into a room laid out like a gigantic chessboard, the black and white tiles lined with massive chess pieces carved of stone.
    Miri froze as the black queen raised her scepter. She bellowed out a guttural command that sent her pawns marching forward. Miri cowered behind a white rook until she realized they were not charging at her, but the white knight astride his marble steed.
    She tried to shriek out a warning but her cry was lost in the roar of the pawns’ attack. Cudgels upraised, they rained blow after blow upon the knight, shattering his mount, reducing him to a broken heap of limbs and armor.
    Miri rushed to the knight, horrified to realize it was not a chess piece at all, but a man that lay there broken and bleeding. His black hair fell across his face, obscuring his visage . . .
    Miri’s eyes flew open. Gasping, she bolted upright from her pillow, dislodging Necromancer, who was curled up on her chest. Oblivious to the cat’s offended meow, she kicked aside the coverlet and shot out of bed, straightening so suddenly she nearly banged her head on the low ceiling of the loft.
    She reeled with one urgent thought. Simon. She needed to find him and warn him at once. Her heart hammering, Miri scrambled halfway down the ladder before she remembered.
    Simon was long gone. How many nights ago had it been—two? Or three since he had vanished into the rain, leaving her plagued with troubled dreams of abandoned babes and sinister women harvesting deadly roses. But of all her nightmares, this last, the attack upon the man had been by far the worst, too much like her old dreams, the ones that had haunted her girlhood, strange and inexplicable portents of things to come.
    She climbed the rest of the way down the ladder and clung to the lower rung, trembling. She had thought herself long past the age of her night terrors, something she had offered up thanks to God she had finally outgrown. It had been years since she had had such a dream, so strong and urgent; she still wanted to track Simon down and tell him.
    But tell him what exactly? Beware of salamanders? Avoid chessboards? That his life was in danger? That someone was out to destroy him? Scarcely anything that Simon didn’t already know.
    Sweeping her tangled hair out of her eyes, Miri stumbled out of the cottage, seeking the barrel she always left outside her door to gather the rain. Plunging her hands into the cold water, she splashed it over her face, welcoming its icy sting, hoping to shock away the last vestiges of her tormented sleep. She flung back her head and drew in a lungful of air, trying to breathe in the calm that blanketed the woods this morning.
    Dawn . . . her favorite part of the day, when the world was newly washed with dew, the vivid greens of the forest soft and misty in the early morning light. On such a peaceful morn as this, the violent storm that had hurled Simon back into her life seemed like something that had never happened.
    All traces of the man were gone, the net she had used to ensnare him removed from the tree, not a single one of his footprints or Elle’s tracks remaining. She could almost imagine that Simon’s visit had been no more than another dream