Bride Enchanted (19 page)

“More than that,” he said soberly. “Our son will be everything I ever wanted. My line will continue. In all my long life, I've never wanted anything so much.”

Her skin felt cold. She drew the coverlet up around her. “And that's why you wanted me so much?”

His eyes were unreadable. Cold and bright,
they surveyed her, and seemed again to stare into her soul. “I won't lie to you. I never have done. Yes, that's why I wanted you at first; you know that, in the hopes that you could bear me a son. But no, that's not why I began to want you so very much more. Nor why I want you so much now. You know that too.”

“Do I?” she asked.

“You should.”

“Should I? What if our child is a girl? Or…not like you?”

“The child is a male. And I don't know if he's exactly like me, or you. It's too soon to tell how much magic he possesses. But you conceived with me. And that means that you can do so again. I
will
have a child to carry on my line. My people will not be extinguished. So much as I love you, and that's with my whole heart, this news is not just a miracle for me. It's the answer to my people's greatest desire. It means we will go on.”

“So I am to be a brood mare, after all? And I suppose Arianna was right?” she said recklessly, too upset to keep to her plans, mentioning his sister again. “And you intend to take him away when he's old enough to be tutored in ways you think proper for a…a creature of your race?”

“All boys of your class are sent away to be tutored,” he said softly. “Whether their fathers be mortal or of the otherworld.”

“Not all boys,” she snapped, rising from the bed. “And certainly few whose fathers believe they are immortal.”

“We aren't immortal,” he said patiently. “We live longer than you do. But we eventually die, and so we value life too. And the longer we stay in your world, the shorter our lives become.”

She frowned.

“That's true. If we stay away from our world, we age as quickly as you do. That's why I return again, and again.”

“You'll leave me?”

“In time. Only for a time, each time. I must, Eve, or I'll become mortal. That's why our race is in such a perilous state. The temptations of your world are strong, and always have been. And the dangers grow stronger for us the longer we stay with you. These days we find that our lifetimes grow shorter because each century you invent more and more things that are toxic for us.”

She dragged in a deep painful breath. “So,” she said. “There is more I didn't understand. I know you married me so I could bear you a son of your blood. And you said you intended to educate him
in your world. And now it appears that you will leave me one day.”

“Or you can come with me and our son each time,” he said, rising from the bed, standing on the other side of it, and facing her. “You won't gain years. But you won't lose them, as I would in this world. And I'd see to it that you were happy.”

“With spells, and kisses, and lovemaking, and lies, and nonsense,” she said, head high. “I should have stayed in London. I should have stayed away. Why didn't you tell me everything before this?”

“Would you have married me?”

She took in a harsh breath. “That,” she said, “doesn't deserve an answer.”

She went into her dressing room, and didn't leave until she heard that he'd left the bedchamber. And then she wept, and then she finally controlled herself. She rang for her maid and dressed. She had thinking to do. The tears could come again later. She knew they would.

 

When Eve came down to the breakfast parlor, she found Aubrey sitting there, scowling. He looked up at her.

“I've a note,” he said without preface, “from your father, by special messenger. Sherry, it appears, is missing. None of his friends have seen
him for days. Your father wants to know if he's here with us. I would have said no. Now I discover that he was seen here, on the road, just the other day. But he never came to visit, so the servants never mentioned it to me. He had a woman riding with him, one that they did recognize. But they see her so often they didn't think it important to tell me.”

They stared at each other.

“Arianna,”
Eve breathed.

He nodded. “So it would seem.”

“Then we must go to her, and find him,” Eve said, her hands clenching at her sides. “He can't stay with her. He's got to get back to school. I don't trust her.”

“Nor I,” he said.

“Why does she want him?” Eve asked. “Only to distress me?”

He shook his head. “No.” He rose and walked to her. He took her cold, clenched fists in his hands. His gaze was both sad and wise. “Think on, Eve. I know how she thinks, and if you consider it, so will you. It takes no special powers to realize what she's after, what she wants from Sheridan.”

Eve's eyes widened.

“Yes,” he said. “It only makes common sense. If I can get you with child, as I have been unable to
do with any female of your people or my own for all these many years, then she must believe that Sheridan can provide her with a son too.”

“But he's a boy,” she whispered.

“Man enough to father a babe. And he will grow older.”

“With her?” she asked in horror. “No, I won't have it.”

“Nor I,” he said. “And yet…”

She snatched her hands from his clasp. “And yet you'd love it if she could have a child too? Even if it means ruining my brother's life? He's still a boy, but he's constant, and highly moral. If he thinks he loves her, and even if he didn't, he's a man of honor. If he had a child with her, he'd stay with her forever. Now is not the time for that. He needs to grow up, get an education, and take his place in life. Not spend it with a madwoman, living in a mad fantasy.”

Aubrey stood still. “And so you believe everything I've said is fantasy?” he asked slowly. “I never considered that. By gods!” he said, staring at her, his eyes glittering. “You think I'm mad.”

“It doesn't matter,” she said through gritted teeth. “I've made my bed. I won't let my brother make the same mistake. Take me to him please, now!”

“You think you can talk him into going home?”

“I must try,” she said. She looked up at him. “Aubrey, if you ever loved me, you must help me now.”

“If I ever loved you?” he asked in a peculiar voice.

“If you love me, or love your mission to your ‘people' more,” she said, standing tall as she could, keeping her voice level and strong as she stared him in the eye. “Aubrey. Now is the time you must decide.”

“I
had planned to take you when my sister lost interest in you and your family. I meant to when you knew me better,” Aubrey told Eve. “I'd expected to take you when you trusted me, or at the very least, when you loved me.”

Eve almost stumbled as she walked beside him. What could she say? That she loved him but wished she didn't, at least not so much that her heart hurt as she followed him into his fantasy?

“You look as frightened as Persephone must have done at the gates of the underworld,” he said, glancing at her. “Don't be afraid. You may leave anytime you wish. Don't be dazzled either. Half of what you'll see will be real and half will be illusion. That's for our sake as well as yours and your brother's, and those mortals who have been chosen to live with us. But mostly for our sake. We don't much care for reality, or boredom. We live for laughter and music, love and pleasure.”

“The folklore also said mischief,” she commented, clutching her cloak close around her as they tramped through the dead leaves and into the dark wood behind Far Isle.

“Yes,” he said flatly. “That too.”

It was a cool, dim, damp day. Autumn was gone but it was not yet winter. The day didn't possess the charm of either season. There was no more bright autumn foliage overhead or underfoot, and still no snow to grace the paths or cover the naked branches on the trees or the brown tangled thickets by the side of the path. And here she was, Eve thought, tramping through a dank wood with her mad husband trying to find his mad sister and her errant brother; her seduced, errant brother, she corrected herself.

They finally neared a hole in a hillock; a suggestion of a cave half hidden by a tangle of wicked-looking thorn bushes. Aubrey stopped, turned, and looked at her. He held out his hand. She hesitated.

What should she say when she ducked into the cave and found the place alight with candles, and her besotted brother believing he was in some sort of enchanted land? Did Arianna know herb lore? Had she bemused him, and then drugged him? Because so much as Eve loved Aubrey, when she'd first met him she wouldn't have followed
him into a cave and pretended to believe it was some sort of unearthly paradise. At least, so she thought now that her enchantment with him was wearing thin, leaving only sympathy and pity, and the ever-present lure of his charm and personality, and warm, delicious body.

But because he was her husband, and because she had to find her brother, Eve took Aubrey's hand, picked up the hem of her cloak and skirt, ducked her head, and followed him into the dark cave. It was more spacious than it had seemed from the outside. They walked a long while, bent double down a long, low and narrow corridor toward the back of it. Eve's eyes grew accustomed to the dark, but she still didn't like it. She felt the weight of the world pressing down on her, and the air, while still flowing, was cool, and smelled of mushrooms and roots. Eve wasn't frightened now so much as appalled, for Aubrey's sake.

She was dismayed at the sight of a grown man going to such lengths to follow his mad pursuit of the inexplicable. Who had started him down this strange path? she wondered. Why did he and his sister persist in their fiction? And how could Sherry have fallen into such a trap? She herself had married Aubrey, but it had all seemed above reproach, and, she thought with a smile that was more of a grimace, at least above ground, as well.

The tunnel turned downward and the further down they went, the feeling of the place changed, the air becoming thicker and darker. It was like a grave and a womb. The quiet was so pervasive it was a deadened sort of sound; Eve's ears felt stuffed with felt. It was like being in the very belly of the earth, with the walls seeming to close in closer around them as they walked onward. And then Eve saw light ahead and quickened her pace. Since she now had to walk behind Aubrey, linked by his hand like a rope in a dark sea, he blocked her vision of the path ahead. When he suddenly stood upright, she discovered she could too.

The tunnel had widened and ended; she could feel a warm breeze and smell fresh fragrant flower-scented air. She came to Aubrey's side and looked out.

It was like being born into a new world.

The sky was shatteringly bright after the darkness they'd been in, but the luminosity of it was more than that. It glowed, the very air here scintillated. It was balmy. It was spring here, or summer, or glorious autumn, because it seemed to be all three at once.

There was a long rise of a meadow straight ahead; the grass thick and verdant, shorn as neatly as any flock of sheep could have made it, only there wasn't a sheep in sight. Eve looked around.
There were bushes of flowers, flowers embedded in the greensward, trees were heavy with blossoms, and flowers grew everywhere by the many fountains and streams, and beside blue pools of sparkling waters.

Peonies, lilacs, daisies, irises, sunflowers and roses, apple blossoms, chrysanthemums, mead-owsweet and speedwell, all in full bloom, and all out of season, only not, because it seemed to be every season here. Full-blown fat purple grapes peeked out from where they twined among bright blue clematis, bittersweet berries glowed in the climbing laburnum, and ripe red berries grew beside trailing honeysuckle trumpets. Some trees bore only ripe fruit: peaches and cherries, apples and pears. Some bore fruit of silvery hues, cherries and chestnuts that chimed and rang like bells in the breeze. Golden plums and peaches glittered on other trees, all on the same branches.

Not only the eyes and ears were pleasured. The scents were wondrous—as were the people Eve suddenly began to see as they came dancing to greet her and Aubrey.

Just as the seasons were all one here, except for winter, the men and women Eve saw were all magnificently handsome, and none were old. They all had flawless faces, perfect graceful forms,
and flowing, shining hair: silver as cobwebs and moonlight, black as a moonless night, yellow as daffodils, and gold as the heart of the sun itself. Their faces were bright and beautiful too. They were so light-footed they seemed to walk above the grass, and their laughter was sheer music. Eve watched, fascinated. Her heart felt lighter, even though the sight of all the beautiful people made her feel lesser, as a person. If this were all a charade, a masquerade, a deception, then she had never seen a finer one.

Aubrey watched her and not the scenery. He searched her expression as she took in every detail before her. She was smiling. But then, her smile faded. It didn't feel right to her. It only took a few minutes for Eve to feel uncomfortable. She realized it wasn't real, not in the way she knew life to be. And that unsettled her for many reasons, but mainly because she found, deep in her heart, that she wished it were real, after all.

Still now, the longer she watched, she more she noticed things that hadn't registered with her before. She couldn't help feeling something was askew. It wasn't just the precious fruits. She was a country girl and she knew that pear and apple blossoms shouldn't be falling, dappling the grass with showers of pink and white with every
breeze, and then being replaced with more blossoms, rather than the little hard green knobs that would become fruit.

Larkspurs tinkled in the wind, and lilies chimed like church bells. It was a charming effect, but it couldn't be true. Peonies were her favorite flower, and here she saw some that were pink and white and rose red, and big as cabbages. But there were so many, and they were all so flawless that they lost their magnificence. Because there ought to have been buds as well as wrinkled petals, to show how they grew and changed, and then withered and died.

She didn't desire any silver pears, and her mouth didn't water for golden apples. And the chiming flowers were, after the first minutes, a bit too shrill, jarring to Eve's ears.

Her main objection to this glorious land was that it was all perfectly beautiful. Real perfection was rare, elusive, and always transitory. That made it more beautiful. This display was permanent, and so, to Eve, however beautiful, entirely artificial.

Even the beautiful people began to look too much alike for her tastes. They appeared less handsome because after the first moments of shock at seeing them, there was a certain sameness to them. There were no irregular features
to be seen, no defects, no crooked teeth or bent noses, freckles or moles or lopsided smiles that gave a man or woman character, and appeal.

She looked at Aubrey. He was the most handsome of them all, perhaps because his chin was a jot too long and his face too triangular for perfection. He looked more human. That was what bothered Eve about all the others. Whomever they were, they were of different kind. They were interesting to see, but they didn't call to her, as he did.

But they certainly spoke to her.

“Welcome!” they cried in their musical voices. “Greetings, and joy to you, Eve!”

She ducked a nod of a bow. She tried to smile.

The happy throng of greeters stopped and looked at each other.

“This one, your wife,” one of the men said to Aubrey, “she is different.”

“She is other born,” another said. “Mortal, but though she carries our seed, she carries other legacies as well.”

“And other sensibilities,” a golden-haired man muttered.

“Yes. Mortal,” said a keenly green-eyed woman, wafting so close that Eve stepped back. “Of course. But I perceive there is more. She is not enchanted with us.”

“She has lived with me for a time,” Aubrey said.

“There are things she has become used to.”

The others smiled again.

“But, no!” came a familiar voice. “Of course there is more. Fie, brother. Did you not prepare her for her visit?”

“I do not, have not, and will not try to mislead her,” he said curtly. “She is my wife.”

Arianna shook her head. She wore a sheer gown today. It slid over her perfect body like shadows, revealing even as it concealed. “What of it?” she asked Aubrey. “You ought to have done something to make her happier. She looks at us clear eyed”

“She sees what she sees,” Aubrey said through tightened lips. “I don't coerce her. I vowed to never do that again.”

“Indeed?” Arianna said. “And that's better? Her brother doesn't see so clearly, and he's very happy. Your wife seems perturbed.”

“Sheridan?” Eve asked, grasping on word of her brother. “Sherry? Where is he? I've come looking for him.”

“He is here, happy, with me,” Arianna said. “Unlike you. Tell us, what
do
you see, little sister?” Arianna held her head up. Her corn silk hair floated out behind her like a trailing nimbus of streaming clouds. Her eyes were bright. Her gown was green, and she was barefoot.

“I see,” Eve said slowly and deliberately, looking her up and down, “that your feet are dirty.”

There was a gasp from the crowd around Arianna. And a stifled laugh from Aubrey.

But it was true. As Arianna drew up one perfect little foot, Eve saw that it was indeed grass-stained and her toes smudged with dirt. And that, though Arianna glowed, the glow wasn't as dazzling as the sunlight and became even less so as Eve concentrated on looking at her.

That was the trick of it, Eve realized. Aubrey's people didn't stand close, cold inspection. At least, not her close inspection. The harder she looked, the less breathtakingly beautiful they appeared, except for Aubrey himself. She found him more beautiful every day.

Eve turned to look at him in dismay. Had he enchanted her in some new, unknowable way? Arianna hadn't thought so. Unless, of course, Eve thought, this was all a plot, a sham of some sort, rehearsed and calculated. These were, if they were what they claimed, people who loved mischief. But they couldn't be what they claimed, or she'd see no imperfection in them.

“What is it, Eve?” Aubrey asked her, seeing her changing expressions.

“I want to go home now,” Eve told him, looking into his eyes, trying to will him to see her sincer
ity and need. “And I want to take Sherry with me. This isn't real. Even if it is, then it can't be real for him, just as it isn't for me. Your land, your world, your whatever it is, is very fine. But it's not my world and can never be. Return Sherry to me.”

Arianna smiled. “At least our world affects you in some fashion, little sister. You become a poet here. Still, I agree. There is something in you that resists us. But I do not think it is in Sheridan. He shall stay here with me, as he wishes to. He does. You'll see. Sherry!” she called, and clapped her hands. “Love! Come to me.”

Eve startled as she saw her brother come walking down the long grassy slope. He was strolling, loose limbed, smiling at butterflies and grinning at the sky.

“He's foxed!” Eve cried. “Three sheets to the wind, and halfway amidships. He's drunk!”

“No, little sister,” Arianna said with a smile as she walked to meet Sheridan and loop her arm in his. “He isn't. Tell her, Sherry, love.”

“Eve!” Sherry exclaimed, focusing on his sister. “Isn't this the best place? The people are up to all the rigs. Such amusing companions! And the drink is fine, you can drink all night and you never get an aching head. And you should eat the food. Prinny's chef would
kill
for the recipes. There's such dancing and singing, you should
hear it. And though I'm not much of a singer, I never go off key. There are games and sports and such entertainments as I've never seen.

“I can't remember being happier. Of course,” Sheridan added with a fond glance down at Arianna, putting his hand over hers where it lay on his arm, “I've never been in such good company before either. This is a wonderful place, Eve. Are you staying here too? You and Aubrey, that is? He's very well thought of hereabouts, you know.”

He sounded sober. He was just happier than Eve had ever seen him, even happier than when he got his first pony, and more relaxed than when he'd finally found out he'd been accepted into his father's university. He might have groused about the work there, but he seemed to have loved the place. Yet now, he seemed almost childishly joyous. Sherry was young, and he was an easygoing fellow, but he wasn't stupid. Now he didn't seem like her brother anymore. He was simply too satisfied.