The Faery Bride (The Celtic Legends Series Book 2) (18 page)

Her pace slackened. She’d forgotten about that. Rhys’s brothers had ravaged the borders these past weeks, stealing cattle, setting fires. It would be folly to set out on foot.

He seized her arm and dragged her toward the stables. “You won’t give me any peace until I take you, I see that. But I won’t have your death laying more woman’s blood on my brother’s hands.”

It was a silent and uncomfortable ride across the frosted valley to King Arthur’s grave. Dafydd rode the palfrey with a vengeance. She clenched the pommel of the high saddle praying for safety with each clatter of pebbles beneath the horse’s hooves.

She saw the falcon soaring high above the tree tops long before they broke through the woods. Under the gray sky, virgin frost gleamed on the heather, its sheen broken by one set of hoof prints. Rhys stood alone by the banks of a stream, his red leather glove the only spot of color in the landscape.

Dafydd yanked the horse to a stop on the height. He slid off the horse and hefted her down with little gentleness, then remounted while she found her footing. “You go alone. Do what you’ve come for, and have done with it.”

The frozen grass crackled beneath her shoes as she crossed the distance. Once she slipped and cracked the butt of her palm against a tree trunk. She picked her way more carefully until she reached level ground.

Rhys swung the lure in a wide circle as the falcon hovered overhead. With a spread of its wings, the bird swooped down and seized the food in its claws, then landed to tear at it with its beak. Rhys’s cloak billowed as he sank to one knee and swept the falcon onto his thick leather glove.

Her steps faltered. His powerful thighs flexed as he straightened with the bird upon his arm. Rhys’s long hair, unbound and the bluest of black, flew in the wind. She squeezed her frozen hands tight, remembering the slipping of that hair through her fingers, as soft as the swan’s down she’d gathered one day off an abandoned nest in the caves of Inishmaan. All the words she’d mustered to throw at him in the bright of morning now clogged in her throat.

“She’s a fine hunter,” Rhys said, without catching her gaze as he held the falcon aloft. “I’ve seen her take down geese twice her size, but there’s no challenge for her here today.” He toed a pile of fur on the ground. “Nothing but rabbits.”

She wondered what he was blathering on about, when she could think of nothing but the feel of his hot mouth upon her breast.

“She was raised on Ramsey Island. She learned to fly in winter gales and to hunt on sea–birds. There isn’t a better falcon in all of Wales.” An odd half–smile twitched on his face as he brushed the bird’s breast with a knuckle. “She was a wedding present, Aileen. From my dead wife.”

Shock jolted her. She wasn’t sure whether it was from the talk of his wife or the sound of her own name rolling off his lips.

“My wife’s dower lands, her riches, her cattle—I returned everything to my father–in–law, everything but this.” He reached inside his cloak and palmed out a bit of feathered leather. “You must think it appropriate that she would gift me with a falcon—a bird who hunts and kills his own kind.”

He stared into the falcon’s unblinking gaze as he stroked the bird’s breast, with the bit of leather hugged in his palm. With a movement so swift that the bird didn’t flinch, Rhys slipped the leather over the falcon’s head to blind him.

“And look,” he said, tugging the leather tight with his teeth, “she even wears a mask.”

He was mocking himself again, and somehow that made this easier. She tightened her grip on her skirts and made her way across the frozen earth. He was just a man, she told herself. She could be as calm and cold–blooded as he, if she willed it so.

“She smells you on the wind, Irish,” Rhys murmured, as the bird bristled her wings. “Always approach a wild thing with caution.”

If only she’d thought of that last night, when this man standing with his profile to her had worked a sort of magic upon her senses. The fumblings of Sean the fisher’s son seemed childish and laughable now. She’d spent the morning telling herself she’d finally felt the natural yearnings of a woman who had lived too long like a bride of Christ. Was it any wonder that a strong man with so much skill could make her lose her senses? She’d lost them so thoroughly she’d forgotten that he’d found her lacking once before.

Now twice.

He said, “You have a way with my brother.” He tugged the rope of the lure from under the hawk’s talons and slipped it in a bag hanging from his belt. His gaze slipped briefly to the silhouette of horse and rider upon the outcropping. “When Dafydd chose to join me in my exile, he discovered that some of my tenants were cheating me on the yearly tribute. From that day on, he made it his personal responsibility to count the cattle himself. I know the cattle–counting is today. “ Rhys absently stroked the bird’s breast. “Yet you get him to agree to drag you all the way out here.”

“I gave him no choice.” What was Rhys babbling on about, standing there with his masked side to her, talking to his falcon and not paying her a bit of heed? “I told him I needed to talk to you today.”

“I’m not sending you back to Ireland.”

Her mouth opened but no words came out, for he’d spoken her heart as if he could hear it himself. By God, was she so simple, then? Clearly she floundered in these tangled matters between men and women. It was as if she’d swum out too far past the ledges. But he must have been involved in such affairs whilst she was still cutting teeth on wood–blocks.

“I didn’t come up here to ask for that,” she said. What a good liar she could be, when Rhys wasn’t staring her in the eye. “I’m a woman who sticks to her bargains.”

“Good.”

“Not that I’m doing you any good here, mind,” she added, trailing behind him as he swept up the rabbits and strode to his horse, tethered amid the brambles. “Despite all the weeks I’ve tried.”

“You have until spring to do your work.”

“If I had until midsummer I’d do no better. I’ve tended to your affliction long enough to know it is not within my power to cure it.”

The moment the words left her lips she wanted to bite them back, chew them up and rearrange them so they wouldn’t fall as hard as hail.
Fine healer’s manner you have, Aileen, blurting out such a thing. Why not tell him he’ll die within the week, and strip him of all his hope?

“It’s been barely a season.”

“I suspected the very first day.”

“Yet you made the bargain with me.”

“I’m not a woman to give up hope so easily. Besides, you gave me little choice.”

“I suppose I did.”

She blinked at him. So easy an admission, after all this time.

“Nonetheless,” he said, “you shall continue trying. You will keep to your side of the bargain.”

She pivoted and took two steps toward him. “If I cured your face, what do you think would happen?”

“I could take off the damned mask.”

“Aye, and what else? Do you think it will bring your brothers back to you?”
Do you think it will bring back your wife?
She dug her teeth into her lip to stop herself from slinging that stone. She turned away from him and her gaze followed the path up to where Dafydd waited. “You should thank that curse on your face. It has shown you who your true friends are. Dafydd is the only real brother you’ve ever had. You haven’t lost anything that you hadn’t owned in the first place.”

“It’s not the past I want back—it’s the future.” The falcon cawed as Rhys swung around too swiftly. “This conversation is finished.”

“You’re no doctor. For all I know, I’m doing you more harm than good.”

“If there’s any harm here, it’s to your vanity.”

The shock of humiliation froze her to the spot.

“Don’t curse me for pushing you away last night, Aileen.” His lips curled in a mocking smile. “I was saving you the horror of waking up next to a monster.”

Her breath gelled in her lungs. “You think . . .”

“Easy, Irish. If your face gets any redder, you’ll hurt yourself, and I’m no healer, as you are so fond of telling me.”

“It’s you who’s full of vanity to think…to think I came here because…because…”
Because he thrust you away as if disgusted. As if you weren’t enough of a mouthful. As if you smelled of fish and common hay pallets. And you can’t bear the thought of seeing the mockery in his eyes every single day for all the months to come . . . still hearing in your head the whispered words of the girls of Inishmaan spoken loud enough for you to overhear. Poor Aileen the Red, mother to all—but of children she’ll have none.

“That must be why you came here,” he said. “Why else would you lie?”

“Lie?” Her breath felt shallow in her lungs. “I don’t lie.”

“You told me your healing doesn’t work.”

“It
hasn’t.”

“It has.” He wound the reins of his horse over his wrist and led it toward her, holding the goshawk to the wind. “The affliction has stopped spreading.”

She met his clear blue gaze and felt the jolt of it all the way to her toes. That couldn’t be. The salves couldn’t be doing him any good, he’d admitted that himself a hundred times before. She’d only felt her hands working on him twice, and then on his heart and not his head. But even as her thoughts tumbled over one another, they faded under the rise of a stronger sentiment, the piercing awareness of his strong, warm body so close to hers in the crisp morning, the oddly boyish tumble of a black hair over his brow, and strangest of all, most unnerving of all, the gentlest twitch of a smile upon his lips.

The falcon cooed a throaty sound. Its wings rustled in the silence.

There was a breath of a moment when she thought
Rhys is going to touch me.
A tingling raced over her skin from her scalp to her feet, a wild, reckless sense of anticipation.
He’s going to touch me.
Her heart leapt like a hare charging across an open field.
He’s going to kiss me.
Her lips throbbed, throbbed, throbbed, throbbed, throbbed.

Kiss me.

Damn it, why didn’t he just do it instead of staring at her mouth so fiercely? Why didn’t he just do it so she didn’t have to think about it, so she didn’t have to listen to that voice screaming in the back of her head to pull away and break this feeling drawing taut between them.

Kiss me—kiss me and let me know the taste of a man’s mouth.

A shout shattered the moment. Rhys glanced up the slope. Dafydd’s mount struck sparks on the stone, then splattered mud as he pulled to a stop. Aileen noticed another rider on top of the hill and the steam rising from its mount.

Rhys shouted, “What is it?”

“There’s been a raid,” Dafydd said. “At old Dunwyd’s place near the salmon stream. They’re heading west. We might be able to cut them off. Aileen, we’ll need you.”

“Me?”

Dafydd’s face was grim. “Our brothers are no longer satisfied with stealing and slaughtering cattle.”

***

A plume of smoke hung over the valley, scenting the breeze with burnt thatch and charred clay. A blackened house tumbled its stones toward the bank of a stream. Aileen noticed the hoof prints of horses and cattle in the mud around the smoking building, prints that wove a path into the woods.

Rhys jerked his horse to a stop. “They’re heading west to Gerwyn’s lands.”

He spoke swift Welsh, but Aileen understood it—just as she understood the darkness in his voice. The Gerwyn of whom he spoke had to be the foster–father who had tried to deny Rhys his daughter. She hadn’t realized that his lands lay so close to Rhys’s.

Rhys’s voice was hollow. “So Gerwyn has taken up my brothers’ cross. The fools think to draw me into another war.”

A boy emerged from behind the building. Sighting Rhys’s colors, he raced barefoot across the field and skidded to a stop. His bony chest heaved beneath his tunic. He sputtered in loose–tongued Welsh, his elbows flying every which way.

His grandparents.
She picked up enough of his words to scan the grounds. Cloth fluttered amid the mud. She made out the limbs of two people lying side by side. Tugging her mantle across the horse’s withers, she slid down the beast and splashed into a puddle. One of the men kicked his horse toward her. It was Roderic, the warrior whose shoulder she’d tended after the battle last fall, the husband of the woman Aileen had just helped through a long and difficult labor. He held out her basket of herbs and linens. She seized it from his grip and mumbled a swift prayer of thanks that Marged had had the foresight to give this to Roderic before he rode out to find the source of the smoke.

The boy looked up at her from beneath a shock of dirty brown hair. How big his eyes, and gray as the sky above, and how full of desperation. With a spray of mud he shot off toward his wounded grandparents.

Rhys said, “I’ll send someone back to you by nightfall.”

Rhys’s gaze focused on the craggy line of the western ridge. The singular moment they had shared by the banks of the stream may never have happened. She wondered if Rhys even realized he’d just spoken to her in Welsh.

The boy danced impatiently near his guardians. Neither of the wounded moved as she approached, not even the faintest twitch of a finger or a bare, muddied foot. She dropped her basket and crouched between them. The boy babbled something in Welsh too quick for her to understand. Aileen didn’t look at him. She couldn’t. Aye, both of the wounded were breathing, and the man’s heart throbbed faintly beneath her hand, but with one look at their wounds she knew the chances of dragging either of them back into this world were slim. The essence of them, the life’s–spark she always sensed when she came close to another body, had faded to nothing.

She fingered a lock of peppered hair off the man’s face. Lines carved his features in elderly beauty. Beneath the bloodied tunic swelled a strong chest, round and thick–muscled. How like the leather–skinned fishermen of Inishmaan, whose arms and shoulders bulged from all the years of hefting nets out of the sea. This man wouldn’t be fishing anymore salmon out of the stream gurgling behind them. She ran her fingers over his brow, hoping to ease the last of his pain.