Embers

by Helen Kirkman

That had been both her choice and her doom. And then Brand had come, like light out of the dark. But the light had not survived. It was impossible in mis world.

  "My duty means exactly as much as it should mean." Such fine words. They hissed through the still air. But they were hollow. She had failed in every kind of duty. To her land, her king and her family.

  To the foreign Northumbrian warrior who had given up everything for her.

  She turned away, so that she would not see the dissatisfied eyes, the face so like her father's. So that she would no longer hear the tongue of Pictland. Bright gold eyes were narrowed on her face.

  He had heard.

  When had he woken? When she had spoken of her duty, whispering in Celtic with Cunan the Hound?

  She told herself it could not matter. Brand already knew she was a traitor.

  "What a delight you are in the mornings, lady.

  Never at a loss. But I am afraid we cannot linger here. However you charm your companions."

  He had heard everything. She knew it. She only wondered that Cunan did not know. She saw her brother's eyes sharpen in anger. But it was only at the obvious dismissal. There seemed no consciousness of the deeper meaning in the English words. The hidden warning to him and to her. But then Brand was wearing his wantonly reckless face, the one that hid all the ruthless intelligence inside.

  He was smiling at Cunan.

  "I know how eager my lady is to journey on to Bamburgh and her brother. The same eagerness must be yours, of course."

  "What else?"

  The smile was returned, with a hint of secrets withheld, a knowledge superior to the other man's. And then she realized. It had not occurred to Cunan that Brand spoke Pictish.

  She was the only one who knew. The knowledge was there like a weapon in her hand. But like every weapon she had ever held either with, or against Brand, it was two-edged. If she gave that knowledge to her brother, Brand would know who had betrayed him.

  She got up, fighting life into stiffened limbs. She wished to appear to busy herself getting ready, so that she could do what she really wanted: watch Brand and how he moved, every word he spoke and every gesture he made.

  The camp was struck. Fast. Brand's men moved with a disciplined efficiency that should have pierced warnings through Cunan's devious head. The only thing Brand stopped to do without the slightest care for time was to make her eat, more than she wanted to. But it was either swallow the food herself or be force-fed.

  Nothing faltered. Nothing went wrong. They rode as fast as they had yesterday, nay, faster, with scouts and in complete silence. They had passed the border into Mercia, the wide kingdom that lay between Wes-sex and Northumbria. Enemy to both.

  She used the only time of respite to seethe herbs for her patient, feverfew, woundwort and blackberry leaves. Pointless gesture. It would not be enough. They both knew it.

  She rode and watched and waited for him to succumb. So did Cunan.

  She had had time to make her plans.

  She made use of the instant when Duda closed up beside her mount and Cunan drifted ahead, drawn away from his eager watch on her by the greater eagerness with which he watched his true quarry.

  She turned to the revolting collection of patched wool that housed Brand's companion and began on the stratagem that might have consequences beyond her control.

  There were not many choices.

  "You realize you will have to do something, do you not?"

  Shaggy hair and a beard that seemed to be a refuge for the remains of last night's meal turned toward her. There had to be eyes in there somewhere. A mind?

  "About what?"

  She glanced ahead. Cunan's brightly coloured cloak caught the wind.

  "Dwyn's bones," she hissed. "I have no time for games. You will need to have your plan worked out before Compline…" What did they call it in English? "Nightsong. Otherwise you, all of us, will be taking our orders in Pictish."

  Something blinked. Perhaps there were eyes in there. She reserved her opinion on the brain.

  "Well, that would not do any good. I do not speak Pictish." There certainly was no brain. "Of course, it would be all right for you. Looking forward to it?"

  Choices.

  This time, she could not tear her gaze away from her brother's unprotected back.

  "It does not matter the smallest curse what I think. I am telling you what is going to happen—"

  "Ah. You know, do you? Got it timed?"

  She gritted her teeth. He probably thought, in his grubby Northumbrian head, that she had added the juice of deadly nightshade berries to the infusion of herbs she had given to Brand.

  This was pointless. There was no more she could do. She spurred forward, after Cunan. But as her horse crested the rise, she saw it. What must be their destination: a little group of buildings inside high wooden walls. The unmistakable shape of a house of religion. The single bell suspended above the shingle roof rang out across the evening air.

  It was a small monastery. They were allowed inside. It would have been a brave monk who had refused admittance to so many armed men. But when the doors of the refuge shut behind them was when the danger began.

  Brand collapsed.

  She had been waiting for it. She knew it would happen the moment sanctuary was reached because it was only force of will that had kept him going. Will and the responsibility for his men riding through the open lands of Mercia.

  She also knew that there would be a small moment that was hers because the watchdogs would begin rending each other apart instantly. There was room for only one to command. She could not control that. There was only one course for her.

  She slid through them, fell on her knees beside the body and flung herself on it, so that it would take the most unseemly show of force to drag her off.

  This was her battle, fought on her terms. She would win it. The fire in her blood surged in the strength-giving recklessness that came only with total commitment to one course of action.

  She raised her head.

  "Father…" She fixed her gaze, a lethal mixture of helplessness and command, on the monk who appeared to have the most importance. "You must help me, please." She let all the emphasis fall on that small word, me.

  "Lady!" He knelt beside her in the rushes. A gilded cross set with river pearls swung from a cord round his neck. She had not been mistaken. The abbot.

  "Quickly. Help me with him. It is fever from a wound. Outlaws. We were attacked…" It would serve. Not one person in their party was going to admit who they really were or what they were doing.

  She permitted a sob. It was not difficult. The abbot made distracted noises of comfort but she was pleased to see his hands on the patient, his gaze, were direct and competent. He might have the strength to take her side.

  "Thank you." She breathed it.

  Only then did she give in to the need to look at Brand. Like Duda and Cunan, she fought tactically.

  His face terrified her. The paleness and the shadows round the eyes. She had thought she was prepared for this. She was not.

  "Dear heart." It came out without any of the duplicity she had planned. She touched his face. It burned her hand. She thought he was gone, lost in the grip of the fever world, but then the thick-lashed eyes fluttered.

  "Brand? It will be all right. There is help for you here that—"

  The look in his eyes, one slight movement of his hand, cut that all off as irrelevant.

  "Alina…"

  She could scarce hear. All she could see was the terrible effort this took.

  "Do not speak."

  But the eyes held her: gold light, unquenchable. It was as though hurt and betrayal and bitterness no longer existed. It was the look that had passed between them and changed the world's shape for them. For her it had been stronger than the power of isolation, despair and the malice of two kingdoms. Still was.

  "Alina…trust Duda. He knows…"

  She leant lower, trying to shield him from view with her body. All he
r senses trained on the strained mouth.

  "Do not go with Cunan… betray…"

  Her brother, her flesh and blood. Her only link with her home.

  "Why…" But it was too late. Someone grabbed her arm and even as she braced herself, clinging to the fever-wracked body she could feel the life of consciousness drain out of it.

  "Lady, come away." .

  Duda. Even his hands were hairy. He had won then. It was hardly surprising. He had half a dozen Northumbrians at his back.

  Above her she heard Cunan's voice arguing. He was the one who was supposed to protect her.

  But all she could see, all she could think of was the lifeless form in her arms and the fact that his last conscious thought, right or wrong, whatever he believed her future should be, had been of her. All that filled her mind was the bond that had been forged between them those long months ago in Bamburgh. Tested by loss that could not be borne without breaking.

  Their bond was shattered, yet even so, her last thought, her last action, would be for him.

  Behind her Cunan's voice rose. The werewolf's paw on her arm tightened. There was only one weapon that would keep her with Brand.

  She fixed her gaze on the abbot.

  "Father, if you could send for the infirmarian to help my husband…" There was an appalled silence behind her. She filled it by saying, "I know something of healing myself and I can help."

  She took a strength-giving breath. "My husband is all in the world to me." She let her voice rise in pitch, become shrill, but piercingly clear. "I will not be parted from him." The words rent the air in a male-chilling shriek of womanly desperation.

  Her hand, despite the weakness of badly healed bones, despite the grip of the wolf's claws at her wrist, embedded itself in Brand's tunic. The other hand lighted on his unconscious face with a possessiveness none could miss. It was not feigned.

  No one moved. She took another breath. She sobbed. The abbot must have thought it pathetic. The others knew precisely what it was: a declaration of war.

  The next sob took on an edge that made teeth grate.

  "Of course you must stay with your husband and help care for him. There is terrible danger on the road for travellers. We will do all we can to aid you." The abbot's hand patted her shoulder in a commendable attempt to stem the threatening flood of hysterics. She used the opportunity to shake off the werewolf's paw. Her foot slid back, stabbing into Cunan's ankle.

  The abbot got to his feet, filling the small space she had created behind her. "You and your husband are safe now."

  She looked up, her eyes swimming with tears and, she hoped, quite luminous with gratitude. Gracious-ness in victory. Always.

  "Saint Dwyn reward you for your kindness, Father."

  Even Brand would have appreciated the apposite-ness of that

  He was going to die.

  It was so obvious that when the abbot came to administer extreme unction, no one protested.

  Alina watched. It did not matter what she had done, neither her strategy, nor her vain attempts at healing. Some things could not be turned aside.

  The infirmarian had tried everything, every wort and herb and simple. No one could have faulted his skill. Just as no one could doubt the faithful wife's devotion, or the watchful loyalty of companions, all of them, bristling with weapons. Cunan had had the sense to keep his mouth shut Duda, his command firmly established, was not in a mood to refer to reason.

  She glanced at Cunan's furious face. She did not believe he would be harmed while Brand was alive. But afterwards, if he did something that… She could not think of afterwards.

  When the sacrament was over, Duda threw everyone out of the chamber. Healing, he said, had proved useless. Prayers could be said in the chapel with the same effect. Wives could weep elsewhere.

  "I do not weep," said Alina, "but I scream very well. The brothers will hear me."

  She thought for one moment that the seax he was toying with would be stuck through her throat. But in the end Duda did not move.

  She brushed past the naked edge of the blade and sat down at her accustomed place on the wall bench with the pitcher of water.

  There was no point in going on, but she could not stop. Her arm reached out in the rhythm that had become eaten into her brain. She watched the muscles shake with fatigue. It was quite visible even under the coarse wool of her sleeve.

  Soak the cloth with cool water, squeeze it out. Touch him. Smooth the wad of wet linen across the alien-familiar form of his body, the long, sleek, full-muscled shape of arm and leg, the wide chest: smoothly dense skin, dark gold hairs flattened by the water, by her touch. Burning. All burning.

  The cloth under her hand heated before her touch could bring relief. Nothing she could do to stop all that brilliant, precisely constructed beauty, all that frightening, virile, masculine strength from being consumed before her eyes.

  When she touched him with her hand, his fire burned through the aching wet coldness of her fingers.

  Her hand dropped. Mostly because her arm was too heavy for her to move. Mostly because her heart was dead.

  She slumped, buried her face in the damp-glittering mass of his hair. So close that her face fitted beside his like the other side of a coin. His heat enfolded her like a shield against the chills that chased over her exhausted body. If she just cast herself on those warm, strong planes, if she placed her arms around his body and held him, she would be safe. Nothing, besides him, had ever made her safe. The urge to do that, just to hold on to him for eternity, was overwhelming.

  But she could not. The warmth of him was destructive. The breath that slid so softly across her skin was fought for. The wide, strong chest strained for every inward life-giving gasp of air, so that she was afraid to touch it.

  She kept her hand at his head, where the life-force found its home, the force that burned too strongly. Her voice spoke, even before she knew what it would say.

  "You must not die." The words whispered into the tangled, sweat-streaked hair were low, but clear as crystal water. "You cannot. There are too many people who need you. Look at Duda."

  She raised her head to glance across the room.

  "See?"

  She had no fear of any reaction from the heap of despair across the room because she spoke in Celtic. Her language, and yet not so. Theirs. Because they had shared it. It was what they had spoken in the night, when they had fled through the dark, when they had shared what small secret moments they had had, in love.

  She buried her face again in his hair, as though he had looked with her, as though he could hear her. As though it were not utterly and wildly mad to carry on a conversation with an unconscious man.

  "He is loyal to you and he depends on you. He would collapse into a heap of grubby rags and disintegrate without you. He does not want you to go. If he knew how, he would beg you."

  As I would.

  "Brand?" The heated body moved. As though he heard, as though he knew and would not forsake them.

  "Brand…" But it was nothing, just fever dreams. Each time his tormented body moved, each time the dry lips seemed to form words, her heart leaped. But he did not see her, could not return her words.

  The only breath of sound she had recognized had not been her name. That name had belonged to the man who had been sacrificed.

  Athelwulf.

  The. division between them was not in the power of either of them to heal.

  She touched his brow. But even her touch made him twist away from her, like someone in torture.

  like someone who was cut off, even from what would help them.

  Like someone who was alone.

  Even when he said his brother's name it was as though he warded someone away.

  She picked up the cloth, plunged it into the water, squeezed it out. Her hand shook, from exhaustion, from fear, from pity and helplessness and…soul-destroying rage. The cloth hit the wall with a smack that shocked the rag bundle on the other side of the bed out of its motionless despair.r />
  She did not care. Her hands sank into the heap of discarded herbs on the scrubbed wooden table, horehound and feverfew, henbane, viper's bugloss and the seeds of cleavers. And vervain. Vervain the enchantment herb that staunched bleeding, dispelled fevers and the effects of snakebite, and when it was rubbed on the body granted wishes.

  It conciliated hearts.

  There was naught it could do here. It was useless. Everything was useless: the cloth, the herbs, the whole skill of the infirmarian. Even Duda's despair was useless. Her hands tightened on crushed leaves.

  They were all powerless to fight his illness because none of them understood. It had nothing to do with the wound.

  She was the only one who knew the cause. And she was the one who could not heal it

  Because there was nothing else that could be done, she stepped into the flames with him.

  She gathered the burning body into her arms, beyond thought of whether she would damage the wound or strain the laboured breath in his lungs. She held him with a strength beyond the tiredness in her arms, The coolness of her body melded with the heat of his until it was consumed and there was only one body tormented by the same pain and the words that came spilling out of her head were the words she had most wanted to say.

  "It is me who cannot live without you. You cannot leave me. You have to remember what we said. That we would abide this together, whatever happened for right or wrong."

  She took a shaking breath. "I would share all the wrong that has happened, as much as the right I know what my blame is and I would not leave you to bear what you should not." Her voice was like a thread in the darkness, something he might not have heard had he been conscious. "I am with you…"

  Her words sped up, tumbling over one another while she held him. They whispered against his hot flesh. "I have not broken the vow we made, not truly. I might have seemed to because I could not bear the thought of what you would lose for my sake."

  Her hands fastened with desperation on burning flesh, fragments of leaf clinging to her damp skin: white horehound, feverfew. And vervain that held magic. The coolness of her breath mingled with his.

  "I never left you in my mind, in my heart. You were always there and you always will be. If you leave now, if you pass into the shadows, I will go with you. That is how it will be with us, always."