Embers (30 page)

The need to touch her, to force some connection out of the blackness, was almost more than he could prevent. But it was not fit and even as be moved, her body twisted, sliding round in the dark, widening the space between them. The words he had to say to set her tree came out.

"I failed you."

He got up, because he could no longer bear to be so near her and not be able to touch her. Because the separation between them was something mat could not be overcome. Nay, worse: something that should not.

The welcoming cold struck his naked body. Somehow he got as far as the window and the air. He wrenched the shutter fully open and the ice wind of the coming autumn beat against his skin, cutting through it as though it was not there, until it found its place round his heart.

Behind him he could hear the rustling of the bedcovers as she moved. She made a small sound like someone in torment and he turned his head because he always would for her, even if she were not his.

Perhaps she still felt pity for him. The kind of pity that had driven her through heaven knew what dangers into Wessex, because she did not want to harm him. Her pity was like a rope made of steel, if such a thing could have been fashioned. It never let go, not even of her dangerous and tormented family.

"It is over, Alina." The words seemed stuck in the frozen column of his throat. He forced them out. "There cannot be a future for us, however much we have tried to make it so. I cannot undo the harm I have done you, but I would not cause more."

"That is not what I fear."

But it was.
I am afraid
. The way he had touched her with such wildness. The way he had slipped the bonds of control when he had killed Goadel. Such a thing would never be out of his mind. That he was like a savage. Because of what was inside him.

He had to cut the tie of her pity. He stared back into the blackness of the room.

"If you are not afraid, you should be." The coldness of the air, blessing and bane, took everything. She must have heard it in his voice, sensed the death grip of it.

"You must go, Alina, while you can. Go to Strath-Cldta. There will not be another chance." It was so hard-won, that freedom for her, so fragile just as she was.

"You will be safe at Alcluyd. You said it was the only place you were ever happy. That what you wanted was your own place in the world. I could not give you that before. I can now."

He turned back to the open window and the cold seared him as though it had the sting of fire.

"Take that of me at least." His voice splintered on the ice. He forced the last words out.

"I have nothing else."

Alina crawled over the bed.

She stared at the lethal black profile outlined in the wash of moonlight. Shadows and silver light like ice crystals.

The wildly tangled bedcovers slid off her legs. There was silence. Nothing moved except the thick, painful beating of her heart.

The moonlight showed her every plane and every ridged muscle of his shoulders. The rest fell into the unknown dark. The only other gleam she could make out was the white line of the linen strapping round his chest. She could not even see the goldness of his hair.

She swung her legs over the edge of the bed. Coldness. Freezing.

There were choices and there were things beyond that

We will abide this together. Always.

His skin was colder than it had been when she had thought he had drowned in the clear rushing water of the river. Rigid muscle moved.

"Don't—" It was not so much a word as a sound, a sound that had the intensity of some great beast of prey that would kill itself or others before it would fall to a hunter's spear.

She kept her hand where it was and the coldness of him seeped through her fingers.

"I will not go." Her hand spread out across the frozen flesh. She hoped it was not shaking. "Not yet."

"Not
yet
." The great head turned with a speed that was savage. His eyes, in the shadows, were not gold at all but black.

"Not yet? Then when? When we have completed our—unfinished business? When I have bedded you as though I were some stag in the rut? Because that is what I would do, Alina. Is that what you want?"

She saw the direction of the black gaze, on her hand where it lay on the moon-silvered skin of his arm.

"Believe me, it is not what you would want." The harshness in his words, in his gaze, hurt like the cold.

"I—"

"What? What will you say? That that would be a fitting ending to all the futility that we have shared? That after it you will go?"

She could feel the coldness right inside her now, blighting all she had. It would freeze her mind and she would not be able to think. Already she felt the dizzy sickness of that cold. It would freeze her heart, rob her senses and she would drop where she stood, right here on the floor among the rushes. Just like—there was no reason to think of her father. None at all.

"Go now, while there is something left that is not marred."

No reason to think of her father. Brand was not like him.

But he had known, where she had not, that her father had not been able to express what was inside his heart.

Her father with his desperate love. With his desperate selfishness.

Brand did not deal in selfishness. He did not try to trap people.

She looked up.

"I will not leave, either to go to Strath-Clòta or to Pictland." Her words cleaved through the darkness. "Where I will go is to Lindwood near Jarrow. I will not leave until you come with me."

He did not speak and his eyes did not change. Neither did his will. It was the way a warrior defeated an opponent in battle. She did not have what it took to withstand that She did not have what he needed, and her defeat seemed final.

But she was touching him, with her fingers splayed out on his flesh as though she were the lover she was not. The skin of palm and fingertips, more responsive than thought, lay against his. And so she felt it, through painfully stretched senses, the jolt inside that he could not disguise. She felt its rawness and uncontrollable depth, and it was doubly grievous because he would not let that break either the warrior's training or the steady citadel of his mind.

She did not know whether what she did held any lightness at all, or only more harm. She only knew that she could not stop.

"Then tell me," she said, holding her head as though there was no fear and no possibility of destructive loss. "Tell me why not."

"There is no need of words. You have seen it."

They were not the words she had expected. No bitterness. No blade-sharp assessment of why she was not good enough. Just a statement of something that was, and behind it the grief held in.

"I do not understand."

"You saw what lives in me. Yesterday. When I fought Goadel. You saw what happened, and I saw the horror of it in your eyes."

"No…"

"There is no longer room for lies between us, not even a lie out of pity. You were horror-struck. You were afraid of me. You still are."

"No." Her fingers tightened on the tense, lethal pad of muscle under her hand and she knew it would not harm her. It would die first. That was what she had seen. "I was not afraid of you."

Her eyes caught the darkness of his gaze, tried to hold it. There was gold there, somewhere. Gold was imperishable. She saw it in the gleam of moonlight as his head turned to hers as though drawn by some invisible thread. Like a Saxon's fate thread.

She did not know whether the light she could see was fire or ice. Both burned, and it was not mere gold that was imperishable, it was the essence of him, the measure of the soul's power. His eyes held hers.

"Can you not see the truth of it, Alina? Can you not know that I was afraid? Of myself and of what I did."

It was not a truth any man ever admitted. But the soul's power never wavered. The words hung in the air, like a gift made beyond price. She could not requite it. She did not think she had that much courage, or clearness of mind. Or unselfishness.

But she could not leave him like this.

Her hands tightened on the warrior's muscle adorned with the gold that betokened his rank.

She and her brawling arrogant family had taken from him something there was no way to replace.

"You must hate me so much."

"Do you think I could have done what I did from hate?"

Clarity of thought. Single-mindedness. He had said that she had that. He had seen in her things that she had been too afraid to see for herself.

Perhaps she had the courage.

Perhaps she could see, with his eyes.

"You loved me, all the time. But I never let myself believe it was so."

The moon darkness covered everything and the silence held, so that the truth, if it was there, stayed hidden.

But even if she had destroyed what had been there for her, all that he had given and she had not seen, even if it was dead, there was still so much left to be redeemed.

For him.

Her fingers left small white dents on his skin.

If she could.

Her broken fingers straightened out on his frozen, unmoving flesh. There had to be warmth there, somewhere. She would find it. In her head, she started praying to Saint Dwyn. For the right words, the ones that would set him free.

"You thought you were like a berserker, did you not?" The arm nearly ripped out of her grasp but she held on to it. Even though she had no strength, not in that hand. She looked at the crushed shapes of her fingers on his arm. He knew her weakness. He would not use one quarter of his force in case he hurt her.

She began to know what to say.

"You thought you had called up a berserk fury like a wolf skin." She knew the kind of nightmares that haunted Saxons. "You thought you were like one who is so mad with it that they feel not their wounds and kill whatever they see. You thought the way you had fought Goadel was like a
berserker-gang
."

"How else would you describe it?"

"Quite differently."

She sat down next to him on the wall bench. She slid her hand down the lethal length of his arm, so that she ended up with his hand caught in hers.

"You think it was the result of a complete lack of control." She arranged herself with careful elegance on the cushioned seat. "I would say it was the result of too much control."

She tilted back her head and stared at him.

His eyes were like twin slits of ice.

"You were afraid of me. You still are."

Northumbrian bastard. He could tell she was trembling. She wished for once in his life he would stop weighing things up.

His eyes pinned her.

"You told me you were afraid."

She glared right back.

"What I am afraid of now is the same thing I was afraid of yesterday, and that is of losing you. And," she said, before he could draw breath, "if you are going to catch me with my words, I will catch you with yours. You said you could not have done what you did from hate."

She heard the trapped breath. She would catch him indeed. She lunged like a fighting cat.

"What you did was no random act of mad fury. It was a carefully calculated decision. You made it because you had already been hurt rescuing my half brother, who has a much better claim to craziness… And because what I did forced your hand."

"No," she said to the sudden move of his head and the fierce glitter of his eyes. "Let me say what I will. You made a tactical decision, just the way you always do, even though it meant that you had to do the one thing you hated above all else, something that must have made your skin crawl with loathing, something your soul recoils from even now."

"Alina—"

He might thrash about in her trap but there would be no escape.

"You did it for me." She took a breath that made her lungs shake. "For me and for my appalling family and for everyone else who was there, so they would not be killed. Do you deny that?"

"For me to fight with Goadel was the only sane choice. It—" He broke off. He saw the trap. She felt the breath that he took and the pain of it, as though it were hers.

"It was the way I did it, not what I did."

Black muscle moved beside her. Outside the fine chamber, the restless sea beat against the rocks. The darkness poured in through the open window and with it the cold.

But there was moonlight. It silvered his skin and the coiling richness of his hair. *

"I do not think you had any other choice once you had made your decision."

"The other choice—"

"Would have been to sacrifice my father and perhaps me, and to take all of Goadel's men by battle. I do not think you would have chosen that. You did not want such harm."

The black muscle condensed. She would not be able to hold it. The trap would not be tight enough.

"You did not want harm to come to me." If she watched his eyes, she would be able to see past the ice.

She tried to hold his gaze with all of her will because even now he would be able to escape her with one turn of his head, with the slightest movement of thick-ridged flesh against the useless barrier of her hand.

She fixed her face into a line as implacable as his.

"Do you know what else I think? I think you did not actually achieve what you believe you did."

He was like a great black shadow, moonlight and moving air currents wrapped round him.

"Nay. In that you are utterly wrong."

He had not denied anything else. Her heart hammered.

"It is you who are wrong."

Flexible muscle slid against her flesh.

"You were wrong. I believe that you thought, even in the middle of what was a death struggle. You had planned it all, what your men should do, how they were going to protect my father and me. You wanted to see that carried out. I think you waited until everything was in place before you really struck. That is true, is it not?"

The moonlight showed her his eyes.

"Tell me of a wounded berserker who could do that?"

"I did not even feel the wound. I did not know."

"I think you would not let yourself feel it because it would have disabled you. Such things are possible."