|
|
|
|
|
|
Biting her lips to keep back useless tears of frustration, Rhiannon turned back toward the tiny stream that ran by the fallen tree where she had been concealed. Painfully, carefully, she hopped along on her bound feet, feeling them grow deader and deader as time passed. Her heart sank with each moment. The movement was keeping some life in her feet, but her hands were dead already. Even if she found a stone, how would she be able to draw her arms across it when she could not feel where her hands were? |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Panic seized Rhiannon. Frantically she hopped back toward the stream she hadjust as franticallyhopped away from half an hour previously. Panic then engendered carelessness, and she fell again. This time she lay weeping for some time, too hurt and too frightened to struggle further. Her head ached, her whole body ached, as much with fatigue as with her bruises. Hopeless, weeping, Rhiannon slipped where she lay into the deep sleep of physical exhaustion. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Dimly, after a long time, a dream voice called to her, It is Simon. Can you hear me? but her dream was of captivity and pursuit and treachery, and she whimpered softly, afraid even in her sleep to respond to that seductive hope of safety. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
When Simon had no answer to his call, fear for Rhiannon gripped him again. It did not seem possible to him that, bound as she must be, Rhiannon could have gone farther than his voice would carry. A hundred deaths, each more horrible than the last, flashed through his mind. Without another look in Madog's direction, he set off to follow Rhiannon's trail. However, he was hardly out of sight of the fallen tree when he saw her lying on the ground. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
''Rhiannon!" he cried. "Beloved!" |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
So close as he was, his voice was too loud to be mixed into a dream. Rhiannon's eyes opened. "Simon," she breathed, "oh, Simon! How did you find me?" |
|
|
|
|
|