The Faery Bride (The Celtic Legends Series Book 2) (27 page)

“There are servants for that.”

“Not enough of them, with the master mason and his carpenters and stone–cutters all filling up the table.”

She had a bit of a fit upon her. He’d learned to read the flash of her eyes. His blood rushed at the thought of it.

He said, “The conversation in the hall wasn’t to your liking, then.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You fled in a temper.”

“Me? In a temper?” She scraped the leavings of the leeks into a basket for the pigs. “You mistake me. I was quite interested in that stonecutter who said he’d been set upon by a swarm of wasps just the other day, so early in the season, with not a flower blooming in all the hills of Wales.”

“I’d have wagered it was the talk of the north tower that had you seething.”

“It’s funny how the stones crumble into dust as soon as they’re brought over the bridge.”

He felt the ghost of a smile tug at his lips. She never backed down from a confrontation, no, not Aileen the Red. His cock hardened at the sight of her, so proud before him despite the woolen tunic and the streak of soil across her cheek. Maybe that was her witchery over him—to give so much and yet still hold true to herself, while he floundered about trying to find the anger and ambition that had propelled him through each day until now. He didn’t recognize himself anymore. Maybe she was a
lianhaun–shee,
the Irish faery–creature Marged claimed lived upon the vitals of the chosen until the host wasted away and died.

He dismissed the idea. After all these nights when she’d laid her bare hands upon his bare face and chest, he now knew for sure that this woman wielded no magic.

“So,” she said, tugging a lock of her hair off her shoulder where it had clung to the perspiration beading on her neck. “What brought you across the cold yard into the heat of these kitchens? I saw you eat enough bread to fill two men’s bellies and enough soup to drown—Oh!”

He’d rounded the table and seized her by the hips. Then he hefted her up on the wooden surface. After the initial shock, a smile started to play about her lips.
The wench.
She knew her power over him.

“If it’s not dinner,” she murmured, running a finger down his throat, “then it must be a game of chess you’re hankering after. There will come a day when I will beat you yet.”

He ignored her and set to the ties of her tunic. Her skin smelled all green and fresh, as if she’d been rolling around in the garden she’d just ordered plowed.

“If it’s not a game of chess,” she continued, as he yanked the last knot undone, “then it must be more talk of scaffolding and mortar–making—”

“You talk too much, Irish.”

With a clatter of bowls and spoons he swiped the table behind her free of clutter. Then he pressed her down upon it. A cloud of flour rose up around them as he kneed open her legs and stood between them.

That smile of hers widened, her arms went limp like the rest of her body, and a heat intensified at her core—he could feel it through the layers of her clothes. He pressed against her and she arched and moaned and bent her knees to feel him better. He traced his knuckles down her throat, and then seized the neckline of her tunic to yank the threads off the body he needed to see. In one pull the cloth slid to her waist. She arched like a cat, lifting those tip–tilted nipples toward him, two ripe raspberries floating on cream.

He dragged his hands over her flesh, pearly in this kitchen light. How dark his hands against her flesh, how small her body. Her nipples beaded between the knuckles of his fingers. He was never more aware of how fragile she lay, how trusting, how open, how yielding, how easy it would be to hurt this woman.

By God, she stole the strength from him. He wondered who was more the fool: Himself, for letting this creature dazzle him beyond all reason, or her, for thinking he could become someone better than he was.

He squeezed his fingers together, teasing her nipples until she bit her lower lip. Over the weeks he’d discovered every secret best kept for a husband—how she liked to be sucked and kissed and touched. He knew how to make her moan with the lightest touch of his fingers. Steam swirled thick in the room. It beaded upon her skin and raised a flush beneath the freckles. He rubbed the moisture on the swell of her breast, into the hollow of her belly. Then he caught sight of a pot upon the table, a pot full of golden liquid.

He dipped his fingers into the fluid, passed it from one nipple to another, and lowered himself to suck it all off. With a groan, she tangled her fingers in his hair, as her legs tangled around his hips.

No honey had ever tasted so fine. He trailed his fingers in a line down her midsection and drew circles around her navel. His tongue followed the sticky path.

“Rhys,
a stór.
”

Darling.
She called him that in this madness they made together, in that breathless voice, enough to make a man forget all reason—enough to make a man do anything, say anything, promise anything, just to hear it one more time again.

“Rhys, if you keep . . . Glory, I’m going to melt away.”

Melt into me, woman.
That would solve his problems. If the boundaries of skin faded, if they were one flesh, then he couldn’t do what he must.

He disentangled her legs, lifted her hips, and dragged off her tunic and shift. The last of her clothing puddled to the rushes. She lay open and exposed to him, rosy and throbbing.

He dipped his fingers into the honey again and trailed the golden fluid over her tender flesh. She made a sound he’d never heard before, a sound beyond a gasp. He lowered his head to feel her quivering against his tongue.

No meal was more exquisite than the very last.

***

Marged strode into the mead–hall with two baskets slung over her arm. Aileen jerked up and dumped a cloud of unspun wool off her lap.

Aileen asked, “Are they here?”

“They are, and making enough noise to break an old woman’s ears.” Marged thrust one of the baskets at Aileen. “Come, we’ll meet them just outside the gate to the homestead, and mind you hand them the eggs with your right hand, else there’ll be nothing but trouble for Easter.”

Aileen slung the basket on her arm and suppressed a smile as she ran her fingers over the eggs. “I’m supposed to break one too, yes?”

“Don’t even say it, lass! Saints preserve us from such a calamity.”

“Saints,” Aileen said, pushing the door open into the sunshine, “and the sure grip of my hands.”

Aileen trailed beside Marged across the quiet homestead. A three–legged mutt loped from a comfortable curl in the sunshine to tag at her heels and sniff at the basket. Little Owen, the eleven–year–old whose grandparents had died in Edwen’s raid, stumbled up from his seat near the hound’s hurdle to nod at her before returning to his leash–mending. Dusk threatened on the western horizon, a faint dimming of what had been a bright March day. Aileen smiled at the rosy pink clouds streaking the sky above the western hills, a heavenly promise of an even finer tomorrow.

As if there could ever be a finer today.

Must be the coming of the spring that had put such a fever in her brain. She had no right to be striding with such pride through this muddy yard, skittering around a clutch of chickens pecking in the mud, glancing at the hurdles of the hounds’ pens she’d ordered mended over the winter and thinking that the ewe–house needed some work before the full of the spring planting began. When had she gotten so accustomed to nodding at the men who gave way to her with a lowering of their heads? All her life she’d been used to people’s eyes following her as she passed . . . but never with such gentle respect, never with such open–heartedness, and she no more than the lord’s mistress set on a task better made for a lord’s wife.

She lowered her face to hide the flush of her cheeks. It wasn’t shame, nay, not shame that set the color to her face, it was memory. Memory after memory. In a season of contemplation and denial, she and Rhys had spent the season of Lent making merry as if they were marked for death on the fortieth day.

More than once this winter she’d sat close to the hearth–fire warming her toes, snug against the Welsh wind, while men shaved arrows or wove fishing creels or whittled toys for their children, while Dafydd and Rhys lingered over a flagon of ale talking of plans for the castle or the doings of his brothers or of the goings–on of the distant Welsh court, which a peddler had told them about when he’d stopped here for a while. Many a time in the gentle folds of that domestic warmth, she had heard the rough sound of Rhys’s unexpected laughter and had glanced up to find him hand–feeding that three–legged dog the remnants of his trencher bread. Many a time, she’d looked up from her spinning to find Rhys’s gaze upon her, his eye bright with lovers’ secrets.

Once, on Inishmaan, when she had been collecting periwinkles on the ledges, a gale blew in and sent her skittering for the shelter of the cliffs. She’d harbored in a crevice in the rock that burrowed deep into the granite. Squeezing in between the slick walls, she’d stood for hours feeling the vibrations of the waves crashing. The salty mist of the sea had brushed silken hands against her skin, then eddies of surf had trickled around her ankles, and she’d pressed herself against the rock at her back knowing the danger but trembling nonetheless with a wild emotion teetering between fear and blind exhilaration.

She’d always attributed that strange elation to how close she’d come to death. Now she knew it surged when she was feeling most
alive.

“Listen to them, my lady,” Marged said. “Have you ever heard such a sound?”

They neared the opening to the palisades. An unholy rattling rose up over the walls. “Don’t tell me that’s the children?”

“It is, and they’ll be clattering for eggs the whole night through. It’s been a long Lent, and there isn’t a one of them not looking forward to the Easter feast this Sunday.”

For years, Marged had told her, the children had come rattling for eggs every Monday before Easter. Now the gate yawned open, and the two bondsmen who guarded it grinned at the noisy crowd winding its way toward the wooden bridge. The men swung back, lowering their eyes to Aileen as she and Marged crossed the bridge to await the procession on the soggy earth of the other side.

“Faith,” Aileen exclaimed, trying to raise her calfskin boots out of the mud. “There looks to be three dozen of them.”

“There are more than just the bondsmen’s children here. But no matter, they’re all spawn of Rhys’s men.”

“Well, unless you think these eggs will multiply like the loaves and the fishes, we’d best get more.”

Aileen ordered one of the bondsmen to send Little Owen to scour the hen house. She plucked one of the brown eggs from the pile and then curled her fingers over the fading warmth as she watched the procession of children near. Beyond them came the first of the bondsmen, plodding their way to the homestead after a full day of planting leeks and beans and peas in the tiny garden plots by their own houses.

She wasn’t fooling herself that she was searching beyond these children with their sticks and rattles full of dried beans just to gauge the number of men who’d be partaking of the leek soup tonight. Nay. If she gazed longingly toward the southern horizon, she was waiting for a certain proud chestnut steed and its wide–shouldered rider to appear.

The children crossed the field and stood before her singing a Welsh song, clattering and banging their rocks and sticks, their legs wrapped in coarse wool still dirty from the harrowing they’d done in the fields that afternoon. Their thin faces lit with delight as they jostled each other in competition. One by one they pushed each other up to receive an egg, bowing or bobbing in thanks before racing around the crowd toward the path to the valley, their precious burden—not to be enjoyed until Easter Sunday—clutched in their hands. Toward the end came the toddlers, too small to compete with the wilder children, and last the gangly older children, faintly embarrassed to be partaking in this ritual, caught at that ephemeral moment of growth when one yearns to be thought of as a man or woman while clinging to the traditions and security of childhood.

Her gaze drifted over the blond head of the girl standing before her to fix upon the silhouette of a rider topping the rise. Rhys slowed his mount to a canter as he reached the crowd of children turning back toward the path down the hill. The dusk cast an amber halo around his hair and his cloak flapped behind him.

Even the children, she thought, pause to stare at such a regal lord.

Then the rattling stuttered to a few clatters of sticks. The cacophony died to a ringing silence. The blond standing in front of her gasped and stumbled back. Aileen heard something crack behind her.

“Owen,” Marged scolded. “look what you’ve done!”

Aileen followed Marged’s horrified glance to find the jelly of an egg splattered at Owen’s feet. Little Owen hardly noticed—he was staring pale–faced at Rhys. Only then did Aileen realize that the black flap of Rhys’s leather mask slapped against Rhys’s shoulder as he cantered closer.

Rhys rode unmasked.

Crack.

An older girl seized her younger sister and shoved the child’s face in the wool of her skirts. A pregnant woman with a babe in arms twisted away. White hands fluttered in the sign of the cross. Then all the children scattered, running away, some of them screaming.

Rhys continued riding toward the lowered bridge. Aileen stepped forward to greet him but he rode past her as if blind. That’s when she saw the thin line of blood that streaked his face.

Aileen thrust her basket into Marged’s hands and strode through the sucking mud while the air still rang with the screams of children. Shoving by Little Owen, she pounded across the bridge and watched men pause as Rhys dismounted and swaggered into the mead–hall. She tore her way across the yard in his wake and threw open the door. A servant collided into her. The girl stumbled back, and then skittered around her to escape out the door before it swung shut. Rhys stood at the trestle table, his back to her.