Embers

by Helen Kirkman

  She was aware, in some other part of her brain, that Duda was on his feet, might be moving toward her. The thought did not stop her, nothing that belonged to the world could. Her hands held him, fragrant leaves crushed against his skin.

  "You will not go. You will live. I know you will, because you will not leave with so much still to be done. With so many who need you. Because that is what you do. Abide with people and help them and understand their pain. You will not go. I know it even if you do not. It does not matter if you do not know. I know it for you."

  His skin burned.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Alina woke in the same position as before, with her head jammed into his chest and her body curled up tightly into a ball, like a frightened child's.

  He did not stir.

  It was like waking into the same nightmare. Except it was not the pure cold light of dawn against her eyelids, it was a flickering golden glow, and she knew exactly where she was.

  She could not have slept. Not at this time. It was not possible. How long? How long had she slept and why had no one woken her? Duda? Cunan? The monks?

  The red-yellow glow beat against her eyelids: torchlight mixed with the light from the hearth in the monastery chamber. Fire's heat.

  She could not open her eyes.

  "Duda…"

  He would be there, the Anglian werewolf, lurking on his side of the bed like some angry, despairing spirit. He would be able to tell her.

  "Duda?"

  There was nothing. Not a sound.

  There was no one there. The chamber was empty. They had left her alone.

  They had left Brand alone.

  How could they have done that?

  She twisted round, opening her eyes, forcing her useless limbs into movement. She turned her head.

  The aching sobs, suppressed all night, rose chokingly in her throat, found their way out at last, so that her stiffened body was racked with them.

  The sobs would not stop. Even though she should not cry. Not now.

  But then that was what had the power to rend the heart most truly, not death, but life.

  She buried her head in flesh that was scarcely warm, that was cool, blessedly, miraculously cool. She wrapped her arms round it, buried her hands in it, her whole body. Held it close, in her embrace, because just for that moment, it was hers.

  He slept. Not like before when she had woken beside him in the morning under the trees, but with a quality that was quite different. Peace. It took her a while to recognize what it was. Because it was something that she had dreamed of all her life and seldom experienced.

  It was something they had never had.

  She did not want to rob him of such an unlooked-for gift. She should move away, leave him, but she could not go. She was bound as though under a double spell. Caught by him, and caught by that elusive quality you could never hold but which had lighted on him at this moment like a gift from heaven. It was just there in the simplicity and the softness of his breath, in his touch.

  She lowered her head with infinite caution, dreading waking him, breaking the spell. She laid her head against his chest, but even with that slight movement, she felt his breathing change. He would wake—

  "Alina…" His voice was roughened, fathoms deep, but not harsh. It could have been part of the dream-spell.

  She raised her head. His eyes watched her, wide, scarcely focused, their brightness hazed, still half in the dream world.

  "You are real."

  She smiled. She could not help it. But she was frightened by it because the smile might show what was inside: the all-consuming joy that was the other side of the terrible fear she had felt. She tried to think, to be practical. To pull herself out of the dream that seemed to hold them both.

  "It is all right. You will be well now, and—"

  But once again, what she would have said was brushed aside, and she could see the same struggle in his eyes to fix on what had to be said and done, what was real.

  "You are quite safe?"

  "Of course—"

  "Duda…"

  Her smile became wry. "Won control by strength of numbers and the measure of his rage. If you had died, there would have been blood."

  The wryness in her smile found its exact match in the subtle change of expression in his eyes. Her heart jumped because it read that instinctive understanding between them that had never needed words.

  A wholly inappropriate heat jarred through her body. She veiled her eyes with her lashes, lest he could see, lest he could guess that she was still slave to the delight of sharing his thoughts and to the rich touch of his body, however fleeting.

  "You must drink," she said. "There is a herbal draught I—we—the infirmarian prepared. You will need that."

  She slid away, so that he would not be able to feel how she shook, sense the hot trembling rush inside her. In her haste, her hand brushed against the thick, curving muscle of his thigh, sliding across the full length of that solid nakedness. She gasped. It was so different, touching him now, now that he knew, now that she could see his eyes.

  She had nursed him for the endless age of the dark night, had touched almost every inch of that naked flesh. She had ached for him, poured all that was of her heart and soul into that touch, and now when he looked at her, her breath choked and lightning flared through her veins. And fear.

  His hand caught hers as it skittered away from the hard tightness of his knee.

  "You were there, were you not, through all that hell dark? It was you…"

  The intensity in his eyes, the rough-fierce caress of his voice, the raw unabated strength in the hand that held her, would take everything. They would take her and all that she was. They, he, had that much power.

  And then what would she do? If she gave in to all that she wanted more than her life? She could bring nothing but disappointment and then destruction. She could not bring the kind of peace that had touched him before.

  "No. At least, not all the time. Of course I helped. It was the infirmarian who had the skill. He prepared this."

  She turned away, towards the heavy wooden table that held the spilled herbs, the water pitcher and the leather flask with the healing draught. He let her go. Her hand slid through his so that she could feel the faint warmth of his palm, the hard calluses caused by sword fighting, the firm deft pads on each separate finger.

  "I will get the draught." She nearly spilt it. It took all the will that she had to get her shaking hands under control. But she did it, and when she turned, her face was the beautiful and unmoving mask that had always kept her inviolate.

  Or kept her trapped.

  She watched him drink and then fall again into the blessing of sleep. But the peace was gone.

  There was something clawing at him, fastening fiend's talons into his shoulder and his arm, sending the pains of hell through him. He could not get it loose. The black, faceless shape of it blotted out the torchlight. It was mouthing something.

  "Oy," ventured the shape.

  Not a hell-thane then, a hell fiend. Duda. Although sometimes there was not much difference. Brand glanced round the small chamber.

  Alina was gone.

  "What?" he enquired.

  "Thought you would never wake up."

  "There was a choice?"

  "Oh. Sorry. Was that the bad arm?"

  Some questions were not worth answering. He stuck to asking them.

  "Well?"

  "Few things been happening while you were not exactly with us." There was a reproachful glint somewhere in the midst of hair and whatever had not completed the perilous journey to Duda's mouth during breakfast.

  "What?" He bit back amusement, adopting the tone of one suitably chastened for willful inattentiveness over the last day and a half.

  "Cunan."

  He forced his mind to work past the pain and the light-headedness and waited.

  "Went off."

  "Off? Where?" He hauled himself into something approaching a sitting position. T
he heap of rags beside him twitched, as though the occupant somewhere deep inside was feeling suddenly uncomfortable.

  "You did not follow him." It was a statement of an unpalatable fact. They both knew it. But somehow it still came out sounding like a question because he could not believe what Duda had, had not, done. Not with the lives of seven men and a woman at stake.

  He closed his mind on the vision of Alina leaning over him, her lithe supple body curving its too-frail warmth against his. Her face and the soft lilt of her voice, both real and imagined in fever dreams.

  "I was… occupied."

  "You found something more important than discovering what Cunan is planning?" His voice would have bitten through steel. He—

  "You."

  "Me?"

  "Thought you were faeg, death doomed."

  He did not know what to say to that. He waited until the air currents in the closed chamber stopped moving against his naked skin.

  "Not me."

  The words would rip something in the sudden stillness. In him.

  "I am the one who always survives scatheless, if you remember."

  Duda was staring at him. He suddenly recognized the expression in the clever ruthless eyes.

  It was the most finely-prized gift in the realm of Middle Earth, the one true and increasingly rare quality that kept the world from collapsing in on itself in chaos. It was the one thing he could no longer stand.

  Loyalty.

  "I do not—"

  "You do not understand yourself, or what you mean to people," said Duda. "It is like a hell-thane's blindness in you when otherwise you see so much." And then before his fever-racked brain could grapple with that, "Cunan was pleased with himself. Doubtless he is a bit more disappointed today with you being on the mend."

  Brand uncoiled his fists.

  "He is back, then?"

  "Aye."

  "And the watcher?" The noiseless sound and the formless shape that followed them.

  "No sign."

  Gone then. Gone to report to Goadel on the whereabouts of his brother's killer and his brother's mistress.

  The last question had to be forced out.

  "And the Lady Alina?"

  "You mean your lady wife?"

  There was never enough hot water.

  Alina rolled her eyes. It was one of life's insoluble problems wherever you lived, at the palace of Craig Phádraig or in a swineherd's hovel. It certainly applied to nunneries and monasteries.

  "Another bucket."

  She would fast be running out of favours at the monastery kitchen. She sweetened it with a smile.

  "I can carry them."

  This went down better with the cook and his sweating assistant.

  Easy. The Princess of Craig Phádraig and former convent inhabitant suspended the buckets from their chain and slid the wooden yoke with practiced ease across her shoulders.

  It was a good job it was not far to the dangerous invalid's chamber.

  "I will be back for the others. Four more," she added in the voice that had directed innumerable banquets involving roast venison, quail dressed in its feathers, mead, wine, jugglers, singers, stuffed boar and jellied quince all in one evening.

  They bowed.

  Something unsavoury unravelled itself from the doorway.

  "Give you a hand with that?"

  "No, but you can fetch the rest." She eyed the disreputable shuffling heap of wool. It seemed to waver in the wind as though it hardly had the strength to stand upright. "Eight buckets."

  "Eight?"

  "You work it out using all the fingers on both hands minus the thumbs."

  Something furtive moved amongst all that hair. She fancied she caught the gleam of remarkably well-kept teeth.

  "I shall remember that."

  The sound of the door woke him.

  Brand had no idea how much later it was. He had a vague recollection of eating at some stage. He tried forcing his eyes open.

  "So how did you get on with that Pictish viper?"

  "Remarkably."

  It was not Duda. It was that other Pictish viper.

  His wife.

  Or else it was a shape-shifter. You did not expect the Princess of Craig Phádraig to be carrying buckets.

  But then you did not expect a princess to have work-roughened hands and an undernourished body when she was waiting in discreet seclusion for her lover. You did not expect her to lie about the fact she had spent a night and a day nursing you.

  Above all, you did not expect to have married her without knowing it.

  But then, he had not expected her to leave him.

  It was more than time that the mysteries about Alina were laid bare.

  She still wore the sack but had given up the hideous wimple. Her jet hair streamed down her back and over her shoulders in cascading falls. She set the buckets down with a graceful turn of her body that must be practiced, using all of her weight for balance.

  But she was so slight, especially now.

  "You should not be doing that. Is there no servant?" he demanded. Which was a really clever beginning and only went to show the dangerous chaos of his feverish brain.

  "Someone else is bringing the rest."

  She was not looking at him. Just as well, because he had made some instinctive move to offer help. At the moment it was not the most productive stratagem to move before you were prepared. Or to speak.

  He had levered himself into some semblance of control when the door opened again to admit something carrying further buckets. It was either Duda or some other and less fastidious shape-shifter. He was followed by a retinue of servants who deposited more buckets. .

  The servants vanished. The buckets steamed gently. Duda remained, examining the wooden, iron-bound pails with distant curiosity. He and water had not always been the best of friends.

  "Always good for a man to look his best."

  It was a shape-shifter. It had to be. He committed the lethal folly of catching Alina's eye. She had been watching Duda with the gravity she might have accorded to one of her uncle's ambassadors. But then she did not have to make any obvious change of expression for him. He just knew.

  She managed to turn the small break in that polite gravity into the sort of smile that turned people as pliable as beeswax. Duda retired in self-satisfied triumph.

  It was perfectly done, and the real truth was that he did not know anything about her at all. Not what had gone amiss between her and Hun, not what she thought or what she did.

  Not why she had ever gone with him in the first place.

  The ache of that was unbearable and behind it was the fury. The fury for what had been done to Athelwulf, to all of the people who had had to follow him into the penury and the danger of exile. The burning, white-hot, limitless rage for what had been done to his home.

  And after all that had happened, she had chosen to follow the perpetrator.

  "It is going to be a bath," she said and began tipping buckets. "I will help you."

  The mind-blackening impulse to stop her at her game, to use force instead to bring whatever was in that beautifully poised head out into the light of day, was suppressed. There were other ways. Ways she might enjoy as much as she had seemed to enjoy them before.

  He slid off the bed. Quite controlled, this time. Every life-giving thread of anger harnessed into a strength that was unreal, that had an existence far too powerful for the fever-ridden shell of his body.

  "Then help me."

  She turned that maddeningly graceful head. He expected the skilful smile that had slain Duda. She just stared at him and her breath forced its way past the soft curve of her lips in a startled gasp. As though he had shocked her in some way. Perhaps she had not expected that he would even be able to get to his feet. Perhaps she had expected, nay hoped, for a weakness greater than it was. She had no idea what was inside him.

  "I have poured the water. There was not much but I can see if I can get more."

  There was more than enough
for anyone.

  "It will do."

  Her gaze slid slowly away from him, the dark lashes veiling her eyes. For all the world as though it were not his actions that had shocked her, but himself. As though she were some blushing virgin of fifteen winters. But that was too much after Hun.

  "Then come and help me, Alina."

  He had not meant the danger in his voice to be quite so plain. But he could no longer suppress that, and if she fled instead of coming near, then so be it. He would almost rather she did.

  But she did not. As always, she took her own path, in her own time. She placed the last bucket neatly beside the others, and then she crossed the small space that divided them.

  She touched him. That, he was not quite prepared for, despite the stone-hard anger inside him. The jolt seared through flesh and bone and all the fever-crazed recesses of his mind. It was sharper than the axe wound in his arm, the awareness of her, the violent need of her that had been one step removed from madness.

  She made the same breathless sound of surprise that had escaped her lips before, a tiny helpless sound of shock. Her slender fingers tightened on his undamaged arm.

  The reaction of his body slipped the reins of thought. He moved, obliterating the small space between them. His hands caught her, imprisoning her so that their bodies touched, melding for one breathless instant of time.

  The fire inside him was not what he had counted on. The fierce desire of his body would be another betrayal if he let it. He would not Betrayal would not happen again. He took a bream, but that only let the faint wood-rose scent of her deep inside him.

  Their bodies moved together so that he could feel the coarse material of her nun's habit against his flesh, the roughness of it a sense-shatteringly erotic contrast to the imagined smoothness beneath.

  He sought control. He was not clumsy enough to kiss her as she might have expected. But the possibility no longer existed that he would let her go. They stayed touching at every point in an intimacy that was nothing of the kind, that left every sense aware of all that it burned for and all that was forever denied.

  He held her in that closeness, moving all that light fragility against him until he could feel every curve as she must feel the exposed naked planes of his body. He held her so until her thick black lashes fluttered and shivers crossed the exposed skin on her neck and the small buds of her nipples tightened from the touch of him.