The Faery Bride (The Celtic Legends Series Book 2) (10 page)

T
he edge of the bench bit into the back of her knees. “It’s not that easy. I’ve salves to brew and herbs to dry—”

“You didn’t need those things this afternoon. You don’t need them now.”

“What is it that you expect then? A wave of my fingers with a shower of sparks? Incantations naked by the full of the moon?”

“Whatever it takes.”

She flushed and shoved the bowl of water back on the bench. She’d spent the day tending to his men. Her whole body ached. Her knees were bruised from kneeling by pallets. And faith, why didn’t he put on a wretched shirt like any decent man would?

“We’ll start by talking.” She plopped down on the opposite side of the bowl of water, as far away from him as she could get. “I’ve no hope of curing that problem of yours unless I know something about it.”

He swung his arm through the air in dismissal. “There’s nothing to know that’ll be any help to you.”

“Are you to fight me every step of the way? Or are you to help me rid you of whatever it is that plagues you so much you’ll kidnap a woman from her home and keep her prisoner until she does your bidding?”

She made a fuss of scrubbing a spot of water on her hip, but she felt the heat of his anger anyway, and the action only drew her attention to how the ragged bit of linen ended on her knees. By God, what a mess she was. Her scalp itched, mud caked her knees, blood and earth streaked her undertunic, which did nothing to soften the angles of her body. And why should she care that she sat here all but naked before him? She was no beauty to inspire lust.

“It started five years ago last spring.” He jabbed the middle of his shoulder, atop the cap of black leather. “It started on my shoulder and every month it spreads more.”

“What were you doing five years ago last spring?”

“Enjoying myself in the court of the Prince of Wales.” He choked the neck of the full bladder with his hands. “We’d finished a round of fighting against the traitors of southern Wales, and we’d won.”

The Prince of Wales, then. No petty baron, this Lord of Graig, she thought, remembering the silks and linens Marged had held out to her yesterday morning. “Were you wounded? Or did you—”

“I’ve searched for a reason every day for five long years.” He swung the bladder in a gesture of distaste. “Could it have been those foul cockles we ate on the march north, or the light of the full moon falling upon us when we slept in the open, or the leper I passed by without giving alms in Aberffraw?”

“How’s a woman to tend to you when you do nothing but spit and roar?”

“It was none of those things. Food was plentiful and the mead flowed thick. The childless Prince of Wales called me son. I’d begun to build my castle. And the first person to notice the thing growing upon my shoulder was a woman warming my bed.”

Her cheeks flamed at the image. “If it were another part of your body that had the trouble I’d know the source of it, then.”

“There are no troubles there.”

“I’ve no doubt you know how to wield your sword indiscriminately enough to sire a passel of bastards.”

“After what you saw today, you think I spill my seed so easily into fertile ground?”

She hated how her skin betrayed her. It was no business of hers what he did in his bed. “Is there any pain to the affliction? Does it itch, or burn?”

“No. It’s as if there’s nothing there at all.”

This was going nowhere. She dunked a linen into the bowl. “I’ll look at the thing and wash it, and tomorrow I’ll have something for it. Now take off that mask, sit down, and stop prowling around the room.”

She whirled the cloth in what was left of the cloudy mixture in the bowl, waiting for her to take a seat across from her. When moments passed and she heard no leather fall to the floor, she glanced up.

The mask still hugged his shoulder and head, but that wasn’t what snagged her attention. She’d seen a dozen shirtless warriors this day; she’d stripped the shirts off them herself, yet with him she couldn’t help staring. In the light of the fire, she saw how his abdomen and a chest were so sculpted that it put all the Irish strongmen of the autumn
feis
to shame. Of course he looked like this. He was a warrior. When she’d first come in, she’d stubbed her toe upon the chain–mail hauberk piled at her feet. She knew the weight of that armor. He needed broad shoulders to keep from collapsing under it. Still, there was something beyond human in the way he was made. She wondered if, because of the imperfections of his face, he’d tried all the harder to perfect his body.

Any woman would feel an inner throb at the sight of such a fine specimen of a man, she told herself. It was lust, pure and simple. She was still a woman and prone to a woman’s weakness. So she made herself raise her gaze to his face. He stared at her with unreadable eyes, though she sensed his mind going round and round with thoughts, churning until she thought she could smell the effort, like the charring of the wood on a windmill whipped too fast in a storm.

When she spoke, her throat was dry. “Is that mask sewn onto you then?”

“Would that it were.”

“Then remove it. I’ve seen your men turned inside out this day, nothing will—”

“I know what you’ve seen.”

“Shall you stand before me like a quivering boy for fear of my touch?”

“Your touch, yes.” A strange expression bloomed across his face. “All you need is your touch.” He seized the bowl of water off the bench and walked away with it.

She startled. “What are you doing?”

“The devil’s work is best done in the dark.”

He tossed the contents onto the flames and doused the room in darkness. Red embers hissed a spray of steam. Aileen stumbled up and edged away, dragging her knee against the bench as a guide. No windows aired this chamber. No light winnowed through the smoke–hole above. But for the embers of the fire, a single strip of amber light splashed across the reeds, emanating from the mead–hall through a crack under the door. Even that was too much for him. His footsteps whispered across the floor and then his silhouette blocked out that strip of light. He shoved something in the crack and plunged the room into complete darkness.

The hairs on the back of her neck prickled as he moved about. The bench creaked when he gripped it. She probed the darkness in his direction, hoping to see something as her eyes adjusted, a shape, a form, the limning of an arm by the light of stars . . . but she saw nothing, nothing but the memory of faint hairs on his bare chest.

Dear Lord, could he hear her breathing? Every sound seemed so loud, and she could
feel
him in the room, a dark mass of warmth. There was no losing him, nay, she’d know his every position with her eyes closed. She could smell him. The smell of man–sweat and warm iron, so pulsing and full of hot–blooded life.

Something thwacked to the floor near her feet.

“The mask,” he said, “is off.”

She hated the quaver in her voice. “I’ve never known a more vain man, Rhys ap Gruffydd.”

“Get on with it.”

“How am I supposed to know how to cure the thing,” she asked, “if I can’t see it?”

“Healing hands,” he murmured in the darkness. “Healing hands.”

It should be that simple. She should just reach across the space that separated them, pass her fingers across his cheek a few times, and have it be over and done with. Aye, it should be that easy, but still, she hesitated, even as she shuffled down the length of the bench and sat close enough to feel the heat of his body against her knees.

For goodness sake, what was happening to her? She’d healed many a man she didn’t like—all the warriors who came to her father’s house gutted with sword wounds and bragging how they’d got them. Aye, she’d touched them and eased their pain whilst holding her distaste at bay, and she hadn’t been the least bit troubled by it in the morning. Why now, in the darkness with this growling beast, did she just flex her fingers in her lap?

Maybe it was because she’d never healed a healthy man. The people who came to her were in pain or wounded, or in the throes of child birth. Now she sat across from a man pulsing with health, a man whose flesh did not scream out in agony, a man who wanted her touch and was clear–headed enough to feel it.

She held out her own arm. “Give me your hand.”

“My wound is on my face.”

“Are you to be the healer, then, telling me how to ply my trade?”

A moment passed. Anger and hesitation pulsed from him. Then, suddenly, she felt the scrape of his palm against hers.

A shock reverberated up her arm all the way to her shoulder. She absorbed this sensation while their palms lay flat upon one another, pressed hollow to hollow, his fingers stiff against her wrist. His pulse pounded against the pad of her fingers. When the shock passed, she blinked her eyes and focused her thoughts upon his hands. Hot hands, he had. Large and strong and heavy upon her own. His skin rasped like sand against hers. She suddenly sensed him with her own skin. Strange . . . he was pulling at her when it was she who was supposed to pull upon him.

She scented the hazelnuts he’d had for dinner. She realized she must smell them on his breath. She looked up, where his face must be, and knew in that moment that their lips were only inches apart.

She drew back and flipped his hand over so his palm faced up. He moved closer and she felt a flush rise up her neck as his knee brushed against hers.

She traced the skin on the back of his arm. Soft, downy hair tickled the pads of her fingers. Dark hairs, she remembered, on a forearm leathered from sun and wind. She’d watched the muscles in that forearm flex as he held his falcon that day. An elbow now. There wasn’t a bit of give in this arm, each ridge as hard as stone, but the skin as smooth as her own except for the ridge of a scar here and there. She trailed her fingers up over the ball of muscle, then into the valley. His muscles were as dense as rock.

She trailed her fingers higher, to the curve of his shoulder. She felt his discomfort like the hardening of a brick in the sun. When she reached the first ridge of the affliction, he flinched.

“It feels,” she murmured, tracing the edge, “like an old burn.”

“It’s no burn.”

“I wouldn’t know that, not seeing it myself.”

“Get on with it.”

As if it were that easy. As if he wasn’t doing what he could to make it impossible for her to concentrate, practically growling words onto the nape of her neck. Though she couldn’t see anything, she squeezed her eyes shut anyway and waited for the quiet to come over her. She waited for the soft slipping into peace. She was surprised it hadn’t come already. She flattened her hand over the edge of the affliction.

She took a deep, deep breath . . . and waited.

The rain hissed harder into the thatch above. Outside, in the mead–hall, a wounded man cried out in his sleep. Somewhere beyond the walls, a horse neighed and a man shouted across the yard. Aileen stroked higher. Smooth ripples, no more heat emanating from them than the rest of his skin. It was as if his skin were water and this part was but frozen ripples in a pond. She traced the affliction to the curve of his neck, to the throb of a pulse, searching for pain, for something, and there she waited, while beneath her fingers the pulse throbbed, throbbed, throbbed.

This couldn’t be.

I must concentrate on the task before me, not the man.

She took another breath, deeper this time. The fragrance of his skin filled her head, the fragrance of leather and horse and sweet mead.

The pulse throbbed, throbbed, throbbed.

She blinked her eyes open. She stared blindly where she knew her hand lay. Then she jerked up from the bench.

“Enough for one night.” She fumbled in the dark for the wet and dirty linens, giving up the overturned bowl as lost. “I’ll make up a salve for you and we’ll set upon it again another day.”

She stumbled her way through the dark to where she supposed the door was. She pushed it open. The dim red glow of the mead–hall blinded her but she did not stop her pace. Her feet scraped through the rushes. Her lungs ached for fresh, clean air. The palm of her hand tingled as if she’d scraped it upon a bed of nettles.

But when she’d laid that hand upon Rhys ap Gruffydd, she had felt nothing.

Nothing at all.

***

“Pay no mind to these girls, my lady. I know they’re bringing you water when you want lard, or hemp when you want linens. It’s not the language they don’t understand. They just don’t have a wit of sense in them these days.”

Aileen took the linens Marged offered and sank to her knees next to the pallet of a sleeping warrior. The morning light seeped in a white haze through the smoke–hole. On the next pallet, one of the wounded found the strength to sit up and tease a maidservant enough to send her skittering off, giggling.

“All they’re thinking about is the coming of
Nos Calan Gaeaf
—All Hallows’ Eve to good Christians. They’ve been racing here and there, collecting nuts to be thrown in the fire and fighting over the blade bone of a shoulder of mutton and choosing leek beds to be walking about nine times in the night—all to conjure up the sight of their future husbands.”

Aileen plucked at the crusted linen strapped across the man’s belly, listening to Marged’s chatter with half an ear. The Irish boasted some of the same Samhain rituals as the Welsh. She remembered more than one night in her youth raking out the ashes of the hearth–fire, hoping to find the footprint of her future husband marked in the ashes the next morn. Instead she found nothing but the scuffs of sleepy children who’d scuttled across the flagstones on the way to the chamber pot.

She’d given up those rituals by her fourteenth year, about the same time she’d given up all pretense of finding a husband.

“. . . peeling apples and tossing the peels over their shoulders. Do you know we’ve lost a sack of apples already, my lady, and
Calan Gaeaf
is still three days hence?”

“Could you hand me the water, Marged?” Aileen had quickly learned that the only way to communicate with the voluble housekeeper was to interrupt at will. “And will you stop calling me ‘my lady’? Did I not sleep in the kitchens last night?”