Embers (17 page)

"What happened to all the people?"

"We all survived."

That was it. No other word of the dangers and the loss, the constantly shifting threat to a small group of people in exile. The responsibility for all that would have been Brand's burden, his to bear. She had left him to it.

Sun shimmered over him, the way it had always lighted on the brilliant and high-hearted Prince of Bernicia. The planes of his face underneath the light were stark, bedrock strong.

"And Lindwood?"

"That will survive."

"Because you got it back before the harvest could be taken?"

"Because I got it back."

She could see the inner toughness that had been hidden before by the glamour. As though the reckless charm and the easy grace were a covering, like her mask of indifference.

He leaned back. The light shifted and grace was the only thing evident, the fluid lines and the aggressive perfection of his beauty.

She did not think he would say any more. Then she realized he had only leaned back, in that polished assumption of ease, because he wanted to see her face and how she reacted to whatever he would say next.

"Hun burnt the books when he took Lindwood, did he tell you that?"

"Books?" She thought of the impossible cost that could not be calculated by its equivalent weight in gold or silver. She fought to find the mask.

"All the manuscripts that had been copied out by the monks at Jarrow."

"Yours…" She would not have thought that he cared for such things.

"Nay." His gold gaze caught her with the look that meant he read the thoughts in her mind.

"What would someone like me do with books?" The hot amber eyes watched her with their blank brightness. "Such things are not for me. They get into your head, like something permanent."

His voice gave nothing, poised and careless as the leashed strength of his body. She saw straight past it, the way he saw through her. He had wanted those books even if he did not admit it to himself. He wanted the books and… something else she could not yet fathom. Hun had brought destruction to whatever it was, the way he destroyed everything. The way she did.

"They were Wulf's books. His favourite was
The Consolation of Philosophy
. Do you know what it was about? The permanent joys of the spirit, not the transience of this world." The cultured Northumbrian voice dripped irony.

"Boethius?"

"I would not know. And now I cannot. Of course it was only the expendable things that your betrothed burnt—the outbuildings, the chapel with the books. He had the sense to leave all that would truly benefit him, the hall and the workshops, the storerooms. They still stand. They are mine now. I will not let them go again."

"No—" Her voice stopped, because the air thickened, the way it did before a storm.

"I am rich and I have power." The air took her breath, but he spoke through it. "Why did you turn towards me this afternoon, and not towards Goadel's men?"

There was a pause, its span timeless. The water hissed through the heavy air. Behind her the coolness and the dark, the shelter given by the trees, dragged at her.

She sat down in the slanting sun that exposed every leaf and every blade of grass.

"I have told you. I want to go to my brother."

She stared at the water just as he had done, trying to draw the power out of its rippling lights. Not looking at the lights that touched him. It could not matter what she said.

He would not believe her.

"It is love," said her voice, while her eyes stared at the moving water and the blinding light, and her body thrummed with awareness of him, not a hand's breadth away from her. "Love is that strong. It will make you strong enough to do anything."

Her words took the power of the water. Their truth shimmered in the moving currents of the breeze.

"And that is how you think of your brother?"

Yes.

But I was not thinking of my duty to Modern in that fractured instant of terror. Saint Dwyn forgive me, I was thinking of you. As I am now.

"As you think of Athelwulf, so I think of Modan."

She closed her eyes against the light on the water. All she could see was Brand's face: as it was now, full of a light that had nothing to do with the sun, full of shadows caused by the body's grief and the mind's. Then further back, as it had been at Bamburgh, full of life and a joy that had a fierce edge. As it was in a thousand guises that only she knew, that only she had seen.

Perhaps.

More truth slid out.

"Modan was the only one of my kin who valued me for what I was, not for what gain I would bring, or to strike out at someone else."

She paused. The images in her mind took everything. "It is a rare gift to be valued for what you are, to know you can value another person the same way. That is why I loved…above all."

"Above all?"

"Above all." She could see his face against her closed eyes. It was better than actually looking at him. Because the face she saw held the rare gift, just as it had before loss had taken everything.

"I loved that more than life or my duty to my country or my father. That is how I love. I cannot prevent it or change it. It is there. You accused me of single-mindedness and it is true."

She held the face in her mind but the pain of doing that was becoming more than she could bear and the tears were stinging at the insides of her eyes.

"So now you know what I will do." The tears stung even at her inner vision. "You know why I will follow you. As far as Bamburgh." She tried to hold on to the mind sight of him, but she could not because the power of the outside world, the death knell of what would happen after Bamburgh, the separation that would be permanent, were becoming too strong.

"You said you understood…" She did not know whether the words were directed at the vision in her mind or at the real man, beside her on the sunlit grass. She heard him move.

"There is nothing to understand. There is no other way to love."

The real man and the dream man began to merge. The tears blurring her inner vision spilled out into the outside world. He touched them with his fingers, real and warm, catching her dream tears. She turned her head, eyes dream-blind, tear-blind, seeking the real warmth and the dream warmth together. It was there. His lips found hers.

It was different from the way he had kissed her before. His touch was so gentle. And that was what she craved. At first it was like part of her dream. The way his mouth covered hers, the tenderness of his hands on her body, the way the warmth of him seeped through her clothing and her skin to find its place inside her.

Then it was not like her dream, it was real and she thought she would feel the fear, and she did, and yet not so. Because even though it was real, his touch was still tender. And that was not possible.

But that was what she felt, his tenderness. Her body dizzied with its magic and the blood came to slow singing life in her veins, and it was bliss.

But the aching need inside her, the desperateness that had grown in the dark, in the loss and the separation, had a strength beyond control. It was tearing at her. So that without her will, her body quickened and her hands tightened against the lithe, warrior-tough form that was real and full of power held back.

She closed her mind to that. To the strength in the turn of his back, the war-thick muscle in arm and leg and neck. She would not think of that or of nightmares further back in the past. Of the echoing hall of Craig Phádraig and how her mother had railed and cursed against men and their misbegotten power.

But even so, she felt his body tighten against the unmistakable signs of the need in hers, against the small uncontrolled movements she could not stop.

She would not let herself think of pain or consequences or power or betrayal. They were just a price to pay, and she had made her decision that she would pay it from the moment he had touched her tears. No, before that, from the moment she had told him how much she loved him without saying a single word for him.

Her body moved against his in a rhythm as old as time and she knew she had made her decision the moment she had seen him in the small close confines of the Wessex nunnery. The moment he had come back.

She let his hands take her body as they had before. Let them loosen her clothing, tumble it away from her. So that she was open to the touch of his mouth, the heat of his breath against her skin, the scorching wetness of his tongue against desperate flesh and pounding blood. She let his mouth know each curve, take the aching hardness at her breast, let his hands feel under her skirts.

Touch her where he must.

But she was not prepared for the shock that came with that.

The intimacy of his touch on the hidden place that made her a woman, the most vulnerable part of her, swept away all thought, all defence, all her being. So that she was lost. Helpless under the longing.

That touch had the power to open not just her body, but her mind. Leaving her exposed to everything it was possible to feel, even to the memories buried in her thoughts like the poisonous barbs of an arrow. Her mother's curses rang in her ears.

She twisted wildly, but that only made her feel the pulsing hardness of him pressing against her. She knew what he would do and she wanted to move, to tear herself away before it happened.

Yet his touch was so different from all that the nightmare in her mind told her to expect. She had not known, even guessed, that a man might touch a woman in that way, with such sensuous lingering intimacy.

His clever, sure, frighteningly skilled fingers glided across skin that was swollen with need, traced its complex sense-aching folds as though he touched her just for the pleasure of how she felt to him. Perhaps because that overwhelming, uncontrolled pleasure passed through the boundaries of her flesh into his, and that was what he wanted: to feel and know what his touch did to her.

It made her body shake in aching waves, trembling with fear, with longing, she did not know which. But he did not stop the terrifying, seductive magic of what he did. The dark heavy heat of him, the pulsing hardness, did not force itself upon her, blotting out all the magic. Not yet.

His fingers touched her somewhere that made her body arch and every muscle tighten and then his finger slid inside her. Inside the hot, wet tightness of her inner body. It was not that other deadly hardness, and yet it was such an invasion and so unexpected. She did not know why he would do it but there was no pause in the smooth, heat-slickened movement of his hand. Not the slightest hesitation. So that his very assurance made it become part of the pleasure. Of all that she wanted and did not want.

Like him. She wanted him and she did not. She was afraid. The feeling inside her was building and building with a force she could not stand. Because of him. The intimate touch of him against her skin.

He made her feel every heated nuance of his body. He made her own body writhe with yearnings she could not control. The power of it and the vulnerability would take her very self.

That was what men did. Took away yourself, so that all that was left was a used and bitter wreck with no life and no power of her own. Even Brand would do that to her, just by the things that he did. Because despite her fear she could not stop wanting him.

Her voice was moaning softly, as though it did not belong to her but only to the heated aching body that had forced itself against his like a creature beyond sanity. She thought she said his name.

Her hips thrust against that tormenting intimate touch because she could not stop herself. It was as though she wanted to bring him deeper, so deep inside her. But then there was the edge of pain and with it came terror. The shock made her cry out, and the sound tearing her throat took the shape of the fear beating inside her head.

"Don't—"

She shouted at him. She had to make him stop before the sum of her buried fears took life and the truth came out. She could not bear this and she was not right for it. Above all, she did not want Brand to be to her what her father had been to her mother. She could not face it.

But then it did stop, both the fear and the magic. She was left on her own on die grass beside the clearness of the moving stream utterly bereft, beyond helping. The tears inside her eyes were no longer dream tears but sobbing gasps, real, wrenching and ugly with pain. Without hope. Like her.

The coldness of the air cut at her exposed skin. There was no movement. The choking rasp of her breath cut off all sound. She was alone, just as she had always been, and he had left her.

Nay, she had left him. Just as she had before. Only worse. Because this time she had done it out of the measure of her fear, out of the shame and the lameness inside. There was no redemption. A man would never forgive a woman for what she had just done.

She was not a woman. She was a maimed being, crawling about on the grass like some sick animal.

He knew all that she was now, and he did not want her.

He was gone.

Her fingers blundered against the solid shape of his arm.

"Alina…"

"Do not let me go."

They were the only words she could get out of the pit of her mind.

The shivers that racked her body were like fever chills.

She lay against his warmth. Brand could feel how fast her heart beat because she clung to him as though she had a she-wolf's claws. He could also feel how small she was, so seemingly…helpless. All the beauty of her and all the finely balanced pride marred beyond saving.

The press of feeling locked inside him was deadly. He did not want to touch her. He did not even want to see her.

His hand settled on her head.

His fingers curved round the shape of her skull, stayed there as though it were possible to touch what was inside it. She did not move. Nothing. Nothing but the harsh sound of their breath and her stillness.

It was not stillness. She was shaking.

His fault. It was not something that could be borne. He wanted to take the pain away from her.

At the same time he wanted to kill her with all the strength in his hands.