Twice Upon A Time (The Celtic Legends Series) (21 page)

Suddenly, the doctor strode
to her side, seized her hand, and slapped the warm chalice into her palm. “Drink,” he repeated, “and be done with it.”

He stood before her, waiting.
The heat of his body engulfed her in a prickly warmth, like the weight of roiling gray thunderclouds on a crackling hot summer day. He smelled of the outside—of rich earth and rain, of sweat and something else, something indefinable, something she’d instinctively call
man
. The restlessness which had boiled in her blood through the morning found an unlikely outlet in their nearness, for now she felt breathless, light-headed . . . vitalized.

She drank the sweet brew and thrust the empty cup at him. She pressed the back of her hand against her chin to soak up a drop which had slipped out of her lips
. Her stomach made an unpleasant lurch. “Is it poison you serve me? It sours in my stomach.”

He snatched the chalice from her hand. “All sweet things turn as bitter as gall over time.”

“Can you not forgive me for not recognizing you, doctor? Or is there another burr in your braies that I know naught of?”

“
You play games with me, like a kitten with its prey.”

“
There’s no woman alive who’d mistake you for a mouse.” They shouldn’t be arguing as if they’d been married fifty years when they’d only just met. She wasn’t helping, of course. A gentle answer quells anger, Mama had taught her, but this man’s overwhelming presence muddled her senses. “Listen to us, snarling at each other like curs.”  She put her hand on his forearm and felt the hot, furious pounding of his pulse beneath her fingertips. “I ask your forgiveness if I was rude when you came in. I owe you the debt of my life, doctor, and for that, you may call me Deirdre.”

His fingers wou
nd around her wrist and strangled it until needles of pain shot up her hand. “This time, lass, I won’t be fulfilling your maiden’s fancy.”

A flu
sh worked its way up her cheeks. “And what do you mean by that?”

“It means I’
m no fresh-faced boy anymore to be trapped by the sight of a woman’s dancing.”

She yanked her arm free
. “Did you think I danced for the likes of
you?
”

“I
know you better than you know yourself.”

“
A burgher’s daughter can dance when she pleases.” Cat’s fur rasped against her ankles, and Deirdre swept up her pet, hugging him close. “I danced for myself and the glory of the morning, not for some brutish stranger who doesn’t have the manners to knock upon a lady’s door—”

“He’s brought you
from the jaws of death, child,” Moira scolded. “Don’t be complaining about his ways.”

“How do we know he’s a doctor?” She glared at her maidservant as he strode back to the bed and began clanking implements back into his pack. “
It’s an odd doctor who slinks away like a thief whenever his patient awakens.”

“
You have no more need of me. You are cured from what ailed you.” The doctor scoured a silver spoon with the rough weave of the sack. “A blind man could see you no longer grieve your brother’s passing.”

Her fingers froze in the cat’s fur.
Pain flooded through her. He’d pierced her heart as deftly as a knight slipping his broadsword through a crack in an opponent’s armor. Jean-Jacques had been dead barely a month, but she’d been grieving for much, much longer.

“So you have a cure for grief?” She
spoke around a lump lodged in her throat as she dumped the cat back into the rushes. “Faith, you must talk to Papa. You could make a fortune in these sorry days for such a potion.”

“Forgive the poor lass, doctor,” Moira interrupted,
still tugging new linens over the bed. “It’s her nature to be like this. It’s not callousness, no, it’s a blindness to sorrow. She’s had so very much of it since her mother died.”

“Moira, have you no stockings to mend?” Deirdre seized a belt of tiny bells
lying upon the chest. “Surely you have linens to soak or—”

“I’m defending you
, lass.”

“
I won’t wear my heart on my lips when I’ll be grieving until the end of my days.” She clasped the belt about her hips and and then tilted her chin at the doctor. “You haven’t cured me at all, doctor. Have you no other potion to give me now?”

“Time.”

He spat the word. Then he laughed—a short, ugly laugh, totally without humor.

“
You won’t prescribe me milk of pulverized almonds or barley waters sprayed with-oil of roses?” She paced to the table littered with perfume bottles and the breakfast tray and seized her prayer book, slapping it into the cup of her palm. “You won’t fill my ears with talk of melancholic humors and hectic fevers and the passing of stars? You won’t even play the pretense?”

“The stars care not what happens on the earth below. And of the
two of us, it’s only you who might be playing the pretense still.” In two steps he was by her side, his voice harsh as gravel. “Look at me, woman.”

She jerked, but he seized her arm and held her fast.
Something proud within her swelled and straightened. The doctor spoke as a man who could command armies, not as a healer. But she was no foot-archer to answer his whims.

She said,
“I’m no maidservant to be ordered about—”

“You don’t know the pith of a
person until you look him in the eye. Look into mine. I won’t ask again.”

A breeze gusted through the window and the light dimmed, as if a raincloud passed across the sun
. She wondered why Moira bundled linens and did nothing while this doctor gripped her hard.

“It’s my father who pays your fee.” 
She tightened her grip over her prayer book. “I will not be commanded.”

He seized he
r chin and thrust her face up. The cup of his hand lay hard on her throat. Her breath faltered. How callused his fingers, how hot his grip. She stubbornly set her gaze upon the dent in his bristled chin. Deirdre heard the maidservant’s quiet humming as she worked around the bed.

“You tease and shift your eyes about,” he growled, “but I will see them, and you will see mine, and we both will see if we can be rid of the mischief the gods have wrought.”

She heard none of his words. The recklessness which had simmered in her blood since morning finally boiled over. It would be no less than he deserved, mauling a helpless woman like this. So she raised her lashes up, up, past the bristle of his chin, beyond the tight, white lips, up, up, and then she threw her gaze at him like a spear.

White-hot lightning arced between them
. She felt the jolt from within. The clear, silvery depths of his eyes were as familiar to her as prayer. She felt she would have known this man anywhere, though in life she’d never laid eyes upon him before.

Strange.

Foolish
.

They stared at one another in some timeless void, snared, motionless. His eyes
fluxed with emotions she could not all name—a roiling mixture of the shock and denial she always saw in men’s eyes—but there was more. Looking at this man was like teetering on the edge of a cliff and staring down at the storm-tossed sea, jagged with violent eddies and swirling whirlpools. Yes, that was what she remembered, the turbulent gray Irish sea of her childhood, with wind-whipped waves beckoning beyond the breakers, with gulls wheeling above, cawing mournful cries.

Then Deirdre’s breath rushed back into her lungs with the sharpness of a hundred thousand knives. She probed his gaze and defied him wor
dlessly to hold her own still. And he did, as no man had ever dared. A seed of fluttering wonder blossomed in her heart, for among the passions raging in his eyes, not one among them was fear.

With a groan, he released her chin and seized her arms. He pulled her up close, close enough to feel the angry heat of his breath on her face, close enough to see the bristles on his cheek and chin, close enough to see the gold sparks in his silver eyes. He smelled of sunlight and sweat and, strangely, like steel, like chain-mail links w
armed by the sun—oddly familiar, for it sent a sharp and sudden ache spearing deep through her, and for one brief moment she ached for the touch of his lips so sharply that her body began to quiver.

Her senses reeled.
He deepened his search into her gaze, probing, questioning, and she felt the force of his examination as if his broad, callused hands raked over her naked skin. Her legs were no longer capable of holding her full weight. Had any man ever looked into a woman so intimately? She felt as if he saw through all the ugliness and evil shining through her eyes into the part of her soul, buried deep, deep within, that was still good, that was still pure, the part that defied all who called her evil.

This
was the reason she’d been wrapped as taut as wool upon a spindle these past days. Here was a man who did not stumble back at the sight of her “devil’s eyes.”  She’d never known there existed such a creature. Now she filled her lungs with the man-smell of him, gorged her sight upon his height and breadth, and felt her heart flutter on wings as light as air that for once, for once, God had smiled upon her.

He shook her, suddenly, hard.
“Damn you, woman.”

Confusion rippled through her senses. This was not the soft voice of a
lover, this was not a lover’s nail-tight grip upon her arms.

He said,
“Damn your eyes.”

Words rumbled in her throat, but her tongue lay too stiff to murmur them.
Not you, nay, not you, doctor—you can look into my eyes without flinching—surely you among men can see past the horror—

“Aye, woman,
your secrets throb in those cursed eyes—I know those secrets better than you do.”

The
n the moment of hope which had risen in her heart shattered like ill-made glass. Ice seeped through her veins, chilling the vestiges of her euphoria. What a fool she had been. The madness racing in her blood had weakened her defenses and blinded her to the danger. Now another fear stirred in her. Perhaps this doctor had been sent to determine the truth—to seek out the worm of Lucifer in the heart of a young girl.

And destroy it.

“Here’s one secret I know.” He shook her. “You dreamt of your brother’s death while he still lived. There’s no use shaking your head, I know it was that which put you in your sickbed. Tell me this now: Did you dream of me, woman, before my coming?”

Later, much later, when she relived this moment in her mind until the fabric of the memory frayed, she wondered what fount of self-possession had kept her from sliding into a trembling heap onto the floor. Was it the firmness of his hands on her arms? Or was it, as she suspected, the stark terror of being so baldly found out which forced h
er to keep her wits about her?

At the
moment, she did not think. She couldn’t, for it seemed that the bells of Easter morning rang in her ears. He couldn’t know—
he couldn’t know
. She blinked at him, and it was as if the world around her spun and slowed, and in the second her eyes closed, something cold bit into the back of her neck and sucked her into the horror of memory. Against the veined inside of her lids, she saw it all again—the fire-lit room, the monotonous chanting from the shadows, the frankincense burning her nostrils, strange hands clawing the flesh of her wrists.

But that was memory, nothing but memory, of a time long, long ago, when she’d been too young to know better than to tell everyone of her dream of Mama’s death, the first of
many dreams she spent her life praying to the saints to stop.

I
s it my fault that I have these dreams which show me what will come to pass? Is it my fault I cannot stop them? Would I willingly call upon myself the sight of my mother’s death, the sight of my brother’s death?

She crushed her terror into a tiny ball and crammed it in t
hat secret place in her heart. Terror would make her panic, terror would make her rash. She could not be rash, for this time, she was a woman, full grown, not a child in the thrall of a demon. No charlatan of a doctor could pry the truth from her lips. Not after all these years of practiced deception. Not after being tied to the rood screen at church. This time, Inquisitors roamed France searching for women like her, fodder for their pyres. For she’d been taught from her mother’s dying day that her dreams were the devil’s work, and when she allowed them, she became the devil’s handmaiden.

But he was still glaring at her, his sword-sharp eyes slicing away the shell of pretense she’d spent years building around her, mocking all her bravado. Who was t
his man, what power did he hold? She could not hide from that piercing gray gaze, any more than she could hide from the burning vault of the open sky.

She pushed out of his grip, her nails snagging upon his tunic. She stumbled back in sudden freedom. From the corner of her eye, she noticed Moira suddenly rising from behind the bed, where she’d been tucking the linen,
apparently ignorant of all that had passed between her and the doctor.

Deirdre mustered
her courage in that single moment and straightened her spine to face the doctor. “The portals are narrow in this house, doctor. See to it that your swelled head doesn’t get stuck in the door.”