Embers (33 page)

She did not speak. Her hand was locked in his, like a point of warmth in the wasteland.

"I knew that there was so much I still had to do. But what I thought about, what meant more than anything to me, more than wounds or madness or right or wrong, was you."

Her hand rested in his. The quality of her stillness and the silence was bone deep. Outside, clouds raced across the moon, sending ever-changing shadows. He spoke into the silence.

"Alina, that is still so. It always will be so for me. But what I would have you do now is what you wish. And before you say a word, I would have you know that the past is accounted for, that it does not have any power for ill anymore. There were never any debts for you to pay. What you do will be your choice. Free."

He heard the rustle of the mattress as she turned. With night-blind eyes he could not see whether she turned towards him or away. But her hand stayed in his, tentative, equally blind.

"Then I would go to Lindwood."

He did not let go of her hand.
But that was how he was. Alina looked through the shadows at the small glimpses of tightly drawn flesh. He might have been carved of stone. But that was only what the eyes saw. Her touch and her ravished senses and her heart knew the living warmth and wildness and the power that was strong enough to be able to give.

It was the giving that could defeat her now, not the stone.

"If I asked you, would you take me there?"

"Yes."

She could feel the warmth of him next to her in the dark. He was so close that if she moved the smallest muscle she would touch him. She knew what that would be like. She knew his body in every last detail.

She knew how he breathed. She knew if she touched him exactly what he would do.

He would give all that she wanted.

She did not move except to draw the pain of breath.

"If you took me to Lindwood would it be because of what you said before? Because even though I brought ruin down on your head you thought you had not provided for me?"

The words fell through the silence like stones down , a well, taking an age of time to reach the water.

"You mean a payment made in honour?"

"Yes."

"That is what it should be," said the familiar rough-smooth voice of dreams. "Because of all that I have cost you and all that you have given." There was no smoothness in the voice now. Only the harshness that must come with breath as hard fought for as hers. "It should be in payment for that."

Debt payments. So many of them. Inescapable. The cruelty of their weight crushing her. Her heart could not bear them. It would choke and kill her with the graceless desperation of its need. She forced speech.

"A debt payment—"

"I cannot say it." His voice cut her off, the rawness of it striking through her. "It is what I should give you in all honour and I cannot. You have asked me for the one thing I cannot do."

Her body moved, angling round in the tangle of the warm bedcovers. She could not stop it because she was need driven and honourless. She touched him. She saw his face and his eyes. She saw all. Gold held her gaze so that she could not look away.

"I cannot give you a debt payment."

Time seemed to stop and with it heart and breath and all that she was.

"It is not what I want."

Their bodies touched. His heat scorched her skin. Age-old longing and newly-made memory fired her blood. But he did not move.

"I do not know whether you can want what I can give. An honour payment could not contain what I feel. What I feel for you is not bound by that."

His body seemed to vibrate, with the same restlessness as hers. But behind his body's strength she could see all the pain that she had put there.

"What I feel for you is not bound by anything. It is not…it is not an honourable love. I said that when I took you from Hun there was thought and that is true. Because with you I saw what I had not believed in—a future, not just the moment."

The sharp edge of his breath must be like a double pain, the physical and that which was not.

"But the madness was in it, too, the recklessness that does not know limits. That is how I love you. With all that there is in me. But I would not…I would not force that on you, the kind of love that will take everything. I think you have seen too much of that You cannot want that as your life." The pause and the painful breath were something that she felt in her own chest.

"Go." It was the harshest sound she had ever heard. "Take your freedom while it is there."

All that was in her mind and her body seemed to gather itself into what he had called single-minded-ness and she named courage.

"I will not go. The only freedom I have ever had has been with you." She thought her voice sounded as harsh as his. Because she felt so much. Because of all that she risked.

"I told you the kind of love I wanted. It was a love that valued me for what I was, not for whatever potential power over others I represented. Only you gave me that. Not my father or my mother, or even my childhood dreams at Alcluyd. It is the kind of love that I would give in my turn, if you would let me."

She let her body rest against his and felt his warmth.

"You do not know what your love is. It is so complete because it gives. If you had been a man like my father, you would have used all the strength you have, and what you are pleased to call madness, to constrain me regardless of what I wanted."

She took a breath. "You had the right to kill my father but you did not. If you had fought only for yourself you would have used the sword's power to take. You would not have used it to protect me and everyone else. You would not have given me back my life and the freedom to go to Strath-Clòta."

She touched him and yet he held back. Because he had more control than her, always. He watched her and she tried to hold that gaze, to meet its terms.

"You wanted me to have what no one else has ever thought for me to have. You wanted me to have power over my own life."

The faint flicker in the gold eyes was all that she needed. Perhaps. With a recklessness that should have outshone his, she staked the last throw of the dice.

"I have made my choice. I will go to Lindwood with you. Not out of guilt, not out of fear, not even out of the obligation I have to you that is more than I could ever repay." She forestalled the sudden movement of his body with a quickness that exceeded mere thought.

"My choice is just as selfish as you could wish." Her voice trembled against his skin. "The way I love you does not know any restraint at all. You are what I want and what I have always wanted. My happiness does not lie in Strath-Clòta or in Craig Phádraig. It lies in you."

Her body slid across his, gently, with all the slowness of a lifetime's promise.

"If you take that happiness away from me, you take everything. I tried…I tried once to do without you and I could not. It was like living death. I need you more than I have ever needed anyone, just as I have trusted you more than I have trusted anyone. That is the measure of my love, if you will take it."

The failing edge of her breath was caught under the wild blood-tingling deepness of his mouth and there was nothing but his heat and the knowing mind-burning touch of his hands. And the pleasure. Only that.

She could not move afterwards. Her hands shook. Every muscle in her body shook. It was bliss. It was all that she wanted. She lay, sated, surfeited with happiness while the light and the shadows danced across them on the moving northern air.

"So you will take me to Lindwood, then?"

The happiness was real, there under her hand in the hot flesh and the scent of him. She felt him sigh, a sound that was drawn out and filled with suffering. The cool edge of it teased her burning skin.

"Aye. I suppose I will have to now."

Northumbrian hell-fiend.

She tried reaching a hand out to hit him, preferably across the ribs, but it was too much effort. He pulled the wreckage of the bedcovers round her but she did not need that. He was her warmth. Now. For ever. Even though she had thought she had lost him to the ice cold. She closed her eyes and her thanks went where they were due, straight to Saint Dwyn, who guarded lovers.

"Aye," she said in Northumbrian, staring at starlight beyond the window. "Now that you have seduced me—" she produced a sigh to rival his for poignancy "—you will have to marry me."

"Nay… Will I have to go that far?"

"Yes."

She twisted her fingers in the rich gold tangle of his hair and pulled. Hard.

"Argh. Well, if you are going to browbeat me into it—"

"I am. Give me two minutes and I will have the sword at your throat again. Ah—"

"You were saying?"

"Possibly that I would never touch the sword again. I do not think I want to know where you learned to kiss like that."

"Some Pictish wench I met."

His flesh filled her hands. She felt very, very safe.

"What do you think my…my father will say?"

"Yes."

Her fingers tangled in his hair again while she digested this spare Northumbrian reply. "I will marry you anyway." Her fingers snagged in living gold. "There will be no escape. But…what if he does not say yes?"

His own hand, lost in the wild and longer tangle of her hair, was much more gentle. Probably because he was kinder than her. He appeared to be considering.

"Then I suppose I will just have to abduct you again."

She let out her breath.

"Would you do that?"

"Well, think of all the practice I have had. Be a shame to waste it, and I might get it right the third time."

"Aye," she said in her best Northumbrian. "You might…" She allowed a certain inflexion of irony. It was rewarded with the kind of kiss that stopped breath. It was quite enough to stop her heart.

"Do you think that—" Her voice faltered and she tried to collect it. "Do you think that people, the peo-pie at Lindwood will accept me after all that has happened?"

"No one who sees you could fail to fall under your spell."

"Nay, but…you just say that because you are susceptible." She proved it with the boldness he had taught her, but her hands clung to him with a need for reassurance that he recognized. Because he knew her. She was drawn into the utterly warm, utterly quiet circle of his arms. Safe. No one could combine such safety and such wildness. He stroked her hair.

"They know who is to blame, and it is not you. There is much to be made up to them and I would do it."

"They haunted your bower while you were ill. They love you—"

"As they will love you."

"I would do all for that."

She thought of the dead. Hun and Goadel. They had no more power. Not unless she gave it to them. She turned her face towards him.

"I would help you rebuild your home if I could."

"Our home. Then that is what we will do. And whatever happens we will abide it. Together."

"Aye."

She leaned her head against his shoulder and the promise filled the intimate darkness of the Northumbrian air.

Lindwood, Northumbria, 718 a.d.

Alina watched the cloud of dust rising in the summer heat. Two years and the circle was almost complete. At her back stood the people of Lindwood, in front stood Brand, like a shield against harm. Always.

The riders swept to a halt and the leader sprang down, lithe and powerful as the creature he had been named for.

"Wulf." Brand did not move. She could not.

The man so like and so unlike her husband scanned what had once been his home. His eyes were very different from Brand's, grey, dense as slate.

"You rebuilt the chapel."

"Aye. Do you want to see what else is here? Something you can take back to benighted Wessex with you. Books."

"You? And books?" The grey eyes struck light. They were not hard at all. They were like Brand's eyes, full of the strength that allowed people to give.

"Aye," said Brand, but it was buried under his brother's embrace.

"Benighted, indeed," drawled the soft tones of Wessex that belonged to Wulf's elegant, fair-haired wife. But whatever else she would have said was lost in a round of embraces that never seemed to end.

It was like a miracle. They went inside and the soaring roof and the painted pillars of the hall reflected laughter.

There seemed so much that required laughter. From all of them. The bright-eyed girl of the lady Rowena's first marriage giggled, her eyes resting equally on her mother and Wulf. The lady's little son by her marriage to Wulf crowed loudly, hale and lusty with health.

Alina watched them, cradling her own son, the small weight of him in her arms like heaven's blessing.

The lady Rowena wanted to hold him. But when she did, her fine blue eyes softened with tears.

Alina stared at the elegant fairness and the intimidating beauty of Wulf's wife. "I thought you would hate me for the harm I have done."

"Nay." The lady watched the child. "I know too much of what it is like to be caught in events beyond your control."

It made Alina dare the next words. "I was afraid that your husband would hate me for having Lindwood."

"So was I." There was a pause and then Rowena said, "I did not want him to regret what he gave up to be with me."

Alina's heart caught and they looked at each other with an understanding that did not need words.

Rowena's gaze slid away to where Wulf sat with Brand, their heads bent over the books Brand had had copied at Jarrow for his brother. At that moment Wulf looked up and something in the slate-grey eyes made all the cool fairness of Rowena catch fire.

She watched Wulf's smile broaden. It was shadowless. Then Brand's gaze caught her own and there was nothing but the brightness of him, the light and the fire. All the possibility of regret seemed swallowed up by the greater power of the future.

"Wulf is happy," said Alina. It was hours later. They were lying on the great canopied bed and the darkness was threaded with firelight.

"Aye."

It was all that Brand said, but she could read Northumbrians. They could pack something as large and unfathomable as redemption into one short word. She thought the past was healed and the sorrow was gone, even the blame that Brand had kept for himself.