Embers

by Helen Kirkman

  "What?"

  He was all around her, everywhere she looked, everything she touched. His skin, his hair, his scent, the animal warmth of him.

  "I no longer know," she said through dry lips.

  He laughed. She felt it as much as heard it A sort of deep rumbling sound beneath her ear, and the smoothness of his flesh beneath her face rippled.

  "I shall remember this. The Princess of the Picts at a loss for words."

  But she was quite beyond words. They had no interest for her. All she could think of was him.

  He breathed. Much more steadily than her. She felt the firm rise and fall of his chest. Controlled.

  He was a wonderful seducer. At the Northumbrian palace he had been the flame that had drawn each woman's eyes, even though people said he was wild, that he was outside King Osred's favour.

  Every man had been afraid of him. Because it was said that there was nothing he would not dare.

  She had not cared. The danger had spoken to something inside her that she had never admitted. And at a level beyond understanding, it had also touched on the hurts that she had no way to heal.

  She had wanted the fierce and changeable charm of someone who lived hard and fast

  She had wanted everything a lame creature like her could not match.

  Now it was here, with her. The need to touch him, to fall under that earthy, knowing, masculine spell, to feel its danger, was stronger than ever. She needed to taste what it was like.

  Even though she was afraid.

  He moved under her body, the heavy contours of him sliding against her. The lure of him was so strong. You could lose everything, every sense of who you were just by touching him.

  She could not allow that. Because they were no longer together. Because—

  She lay with her eyes shut and tried to believe that her hands did not cling to him, that this was not just some further and more dangerous phase of his testing of her.

  She had to speak. She could not give in to the power of him. She had something to say that was vitally important, and after that she could escape. If her bespelled, exhausted, wildly unsteady brain could just work out the words.

  She opened her eyes. She was so close her eyelashes rustled against his skin. Her head swam in the delight of his faint musky scent. She tried to focus.

  The first thing she saw was a hand clutching at the waistband of his trousers. It must be hers. She stared at it. It would not move, despite the exercise of her will. It seemed not to belong to her. He seemed not to have noticed it.

  "You make a very strange nun."

  He had noticed it. He thought she was a licentious and unprincipled trollop. He doubtless thought that she was trying to practice her wiles on him so that she could regain the trust she had shattered, get him to do what she wished.

  The idea of practicing her wiles on him sent a wave of heat through her so fierce it burned hotter than the harshest fever could, so strong it would burn through her heart. She buried her face deeper in his flesh and shut her eyelids against tears.

  She felt his hand close over hers, thick and solid and strong. Twice as big and wide as hers. But he still had to work at it to prize her fingers away from the waistband of his trousers.

  "Or else you make a strange princess."

  The thick pad of his thumb slid across the tingling arch of her palm, across the base of her fin-gers…across the marring ridge of unhealed blisters, scratches from picking ripe sloes, a bruise.

  Her breath caught. What a naive, sense-besotted fool she was. There could be naught in him of the seduction she felt. Just the clever, determined paths of his mind. Coldness followed heat, like a fast shivering chill, as though the fever that touched him touched her, too.

  She stared at the scratches and the bruised nail, the more recent damage overlying the old.

  It was not the hand of a princess waiting in the discreet, hidden comfort of a convenient nunnery for her lover. It was a hand that belonged to a desperate and penniless fugitive. The hand of someone who worked for their keep in a true house devoted to simplicity and usefulness.

  She fought for her voice. "Oh, that. That was just an accident. I fell over and scratched my hand."

  There was only the quietness of the glade, the faint sound of clear falling water. Running water was so strong. But its pure sound had only one shape in her mind.

  Liar.

  "It seems fated to be your weakness, this hand."

  The coldness stabbed ice through her. He had never mocked at the accident that had disfigured her hand. He was the kind of person whose instinct was to deal with what was, not what should be. She envied that. It was the quality above all others that had scored through the barriers she had set against trust.

  He turned her hand to the sunlight. Her muscles tightened in a denial that went all the way back to childhood. Yet his action did not hold the mockery every instinct expected. It was different: an assessment that was filled with deliberation, quite relentless. That was not something she had associated with him.

  She had no right to expect anything else.

  She could tell from his breath, sense through the fiercely intimate touch of his body against hers, the implacable distrust of all that she said.

  She waited. He still had hold of her hand. The warmth of his flesh invaded hers.

  "Alina?"

  She could not speak. She had broken his trust long ago and the connection between them was severed beyond any possibility of redemption. But he held her hand. Her body. She could not stop him. Neither could she stop her powerful awareness of him. It trapped her as surely as the physical force he was so capable of. Her father had trapped her mother, in just such a way.

  But it could not have felt like this. Not such warmth, warmth that blossomed on the inside just from the touch of one body against another. A warmth that was frightening, yes, but at the same time intoxicating. A warmth that filled her with a longing so deep it would kill her.

  "Naught but a chain of accidents. Is that the way of it?" His voice was as deceptively gentle as his hold on her. Just as seductive. "So many things are not what they seem."

  "Aye."

  Like you, like the way your body feels to me, the way your arms feel around me, as though carnal desire and trust could exist together.

  It was not possible.

  "Sometimes I would rather there was only what seems, and not what is—" She shut her mouth. That was the mead talking. Or her longing.

  Or her fear.

  She was trembling inside. All from the alien touch of male flesh. His flesh. So full of mysterious strength. A vitality that was so uniquely his. A strength that could rend and destroy.

  Or be destroyed.

  She would not be able to bear that She had to say what she must, and then she could be free of him. Now. Somehow. She had to think, even though all her mind could focus on was the strangeness of lying on the earth with a man. And all she could see was their joined hands coiled on his lower belly.

  She had never lain like this with any man and his body was so beautiful, the chest solid, the abdomen a tight, flat line of muscle over the hipbone. Everything she felt was so different in shape and texture and composition, the thick smoothness of the skin, the soft-rough feel of body hair. She craved him so much that it was like a pain. A pain that burned her on the inside, the way the touch of his skin scorched hers with its heat.

  The heat

  The heat was unnatural.

  The danger was not just from the wound to his flesh. The flames were inside. She knew them. Knew them for her own. She would rather they consumed her inch by inch than him.

  "The wound is fell."

  She felt him start, felt the small change in the rhythm of his breath.

  "What do you mean?"

  The words were bland, expressionless. But she knew that the whole of that sharp intelligence was focused on her.

  "I mean that it is powerful." She paused. They were strange words to use for a wound: fell, powerfu
l. But they were how she felt. She sought to express it in a more usual way. "Dangerous."

  The broad shoulders shrugged, muscle expanding and contracting against her skin.

  "It is hardly likely to kill me. Besides, there is no time. I have got too much to do."

  Her heart twisted. He did not know, or he did not admit, even to himself, how he ate his heart out. That the burden he carried was lethal. He just went on. Because there was so much to do. She sought for the words.

  "The payment for what happened to your brother lies with me, not you."

  The sheet of muscle under her body seemed to change out of recognition, reconstituting itself into one terrifying mass of power. He moved, surging up so that she briefly lost his warmth and then she did not. Because he dragged her with him, his hands digging into her arms. She was sitting up, imprisoned against the solid, remorseless wall of his body. Trapped. But that was not the worst.

  She could see his eyes.

  "What have you to say of Athelwulf, my brother?"

  I caused his death.

  She would never be able to get another word out of the dryness of her mouth. She had called up the demons of the past and they were there, in the all-consuming fury of his eyes, bright gold fire, burning, like the heat of his hands on her arms.

  Fever heat. And because she knew what had happened she could see past the fury to the pain.

  "I am saying that what happened to your brother was my fault, not yours. You rescued me because I thought I did not want to marry Hun. You arranged it all. Paid Hun my wergild, my life-price… Yes, you did. I know it though you did not tell me."

  She took a breath. She did not know from the burning, feverish eyes whether he heard her. Whether what she said reached through to the fortress of his mind.

  "But Hun broke his word and chose to pursue you anyway, despite the honour payment. You sacrificed everything to take me from Hun, and Hun made King Osred destroy you for it, so that there was only exile." And death. "And Athelwulf—"

  "My brother chose to save both our hides."

  "You did not know what he would do. That he would go back to throw Hun off the scent. It was not your fault Hun caught him." Killed him, burned the corpse so that there was nothing to be found except bones. "It was Hun's fault. Mine."

  But Brand did not hear her, she knew he did not. What she said meant nothing to the fire in his eyes. She tried again.

  "None of this would have happened if I had not thrown myself on your mercy so you had no other choice but to take me from Hun—"

  "No other choice? Is that what you think?"

  "Yes." It was the truth. Yet she could feel his rapid breath, as he would feel hers. Memory consumed her, and with it all the longing, all the fierce desperation, all the pain. It beat inside her, as though it would not be contained. As though it still existed in the silent Wessex air between them.

  She struggled to speak, to go on saying what she must.

  "The payment for what happened to your brother is mine, not yours. It is not a payment you can make by throwing your own life away. The guilt is mine."

  The power of him, all that savagely leashed intensity would tear the soul out of her.

  "Why would you say such a thing?"

  Because that much, at least, is truth between us. Because I cannot bear that the weight of guilt that belongs to me should kill you. That is why I ran away from you. That is why I went back to Hun.

  I want you to live.

  She wanted to shout it out so that it would split the foreign southern air in two. She wanted to say it into the light so that there would be no darkness between them, but she could not. Because if he knew she had cast herself adrift for his sake, he would never leave her. Because he always took her burdens.

  She forced breath.

  "I can recognize when I have made mistakes. I—" It was impossible to hold his gaze. She had to force the words out of her mouth.

  "It was wrong, what I did, escaping with you. Being with you."

  His eyes still burned. But differently. He watched her…differently. She thought he would speak. The hardness of his grip on her arms changed. But she could not have moved away from him. She did not have the strength. Her breath was coming in gut-wrenching gasps so that he must think she was ill. Mad. Both.

  She got the last words out.

  "I realized. So I went back where I belonged. To Hun."

  She saw his eyes go totally blank. Lifeless. Black. It was terrifying. His eyes were not like that. They were gold. Gold never changed. It was imperishable.

  "I made my decision," she said, through the rawness inside her chest. She could not breathe. "That was my choice."

  His hands let her go and the shadows were not just around him. They were everywhere. She was falling.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Alina woke with her head wedged against his chest. She could not move because his arm, heavy, immobile, lay across her waist.

  She should leave him be, after what she had said. She wanted to leave him. She wanted to crawl away into some black pit and never come out.

  She raised her head.

  There was something wrong with the light Pearl-grey. Cold. Not the golden, heavy warmth of late afternoon.

  "Brand…"

  He did not move. Nothing. She stared round wildly at the wrong shapes of the trees. They were not as she remembered. She could not hear the stream. She had no idea where she was. It was like trying to wake out of a nightmare and being unable to.

  Her head twisted. Her arm sought instinctively for the now familiar shape of his body. Cool. Almost…cold. A scream, raw and with the power to tear, lodged itself in her throat. And then she felt it: the faint, soft edge of his breath against her cheek.

  "Brand…"

  But he still did not move. He was deeply, numbingly asleep.

  He should not be so cold. She pulled the thickness of the cloaks that covered them tighter round him. There was a fire nearby. Still burning. Full consciousness hit her. The campfire. His men. They were there. Shadowy shapes moving in the half-light. Morning.

  He must have brought her here from the glade. And she had not known, could not remember. She still had her nun's clothing and over that, the heavy cloaks. His.

  He had taken her shoes off. Her feet were buried in his legs. The solidness of his body curved round hers. They lay, tangled like awakening lovers in the midst of his men.

  "He is ill. Is he not?"

  The familiar voice, low, sibilant with the sounds of Craig Phádraig, was right beside her.

  "Cunan!" Hound. Her brother's breath touched her skin. She could not suppress her startled gasp and she saw the small reward that gave in the triumph of his smile.

  She drew away, struggling to raise herself between the lissom heaviness of Brand's body and the tight aggressive barrier of her brother's.

  Hellhound. The keen-boned face and the intensity of his eyes suited the name. Her father's unquestioning slave. In his person he managed to combine unbending loyalty with the ability to tear people's guts out when necessary. She swallowed. Her mouth felt as dry as wood shavings.

  She sat back, putting a hand to her face, trying to disguise the shudder. She felt appalling. Her eyes burned and her bones ached from the hard ground, from yesterday's exhausting ride.

  "Cunan, why are you—"

  "How ill?'

  The eager, knife-sharp eyes watched not her, but the sleeping form beside her, with an attention that was spine-chilling. The words more ill than he knows, perhaps dangerously so, died on her lips.

  Cunan was her brother, as much so in her mind as Modan, even if he was not legitimate.

  But he was her father's man. His loyalty to that did not include allowance for his sister's shameful and inappropriate attachment to a Northumbrian.

  Past attachment.

  She moved her hand, as though she would shield the sleeping face of the Northumbrian, as much as her own face, from Cunan's gaze.

  "I have tended the wound. It
will heal. There is a touch of fever, but that is as you would expect."

  She shrugged, to emphasize the carelessness of her words. The movement made the cloak slip from her shoulder. The sharp gaze shifted.

  "I am not sure that anything is quite as I expected."

  She was suddenly aware that her wimple had been lost somewhere. That her hair streamed over the shoulders exposed by the rumpled cloak. That before her brother's face she had spent the night in the arms of the man she had abandoned her lawful betrothed for. The man she had wanted above all others as her lover.

  She fought down the consciousness of where she was, the heat that rose in her mind. She lifted her head. Perhaps it had not been such an ill placement after all, to be here in the middle of the ring of Brand's men. Nothing could have happened without them knowing, without Cunan the Hound knowing.

  Even if they did not realize how much cause her supposed lover had to hate her.

  She simply stared at him, with the practice of nineteen and a half years spent living in a court that had been more dangerous to her than to an illegitimate offspring:

  "There are many things that are not as we might expect," she said. "Sometimes we have to adapt to them."

  "But not at the expense of the duty we owe to the land that gave us birth. If that means aught to you?"

  Duty.

  It had been beaten into her head from birth that she must put duty first. She had tried with all that was in her to do what was right. She had agreed to the marriage arranged by her uncle and her father. Because it would forge an alliance that might pacify Northumbria.

  For the first time in her life her father had been pleased with her.

  Then she had found out what Hun was. A savage, a ruthless man who would encourage his king to dispossess or murder anyone who got in his way. Hun was the useful retainer who carried out such tasks for ambition and policy, for reward. For the enjoyment of cruelty.

  Her uncle and her father must have been aware of that unstoppable savagery. They had known exactly what they were asking. They had not known that in the end, she would not do it.