He held her until he was rock-hard.
Until the swollen, blood-gorged jut of hardness of his own flesh was something that ached and burned against the softness of hers. Until the control that he had was something strained beyond the ability to endure.
But still he did no more. Until her eyes would no longer open and her fingers dug into his skin with a force that stung. He bent his head until he could feel the soft rapid pulse of her warm breath against his fever-dried lips, until he could feel the drag of her small weight against his shoulders and arms because she could no longer support that by herself.
Still he did not kiss her. Not until he heard what he wanted from her lips, his name, not Hun's. He moved, but as their breath mingled in that searing instant that presaged touch and denied it, he heard what he did not expect. The last of her breath left her lips, achingly soft and only faintly discernible against the coarse unshaven roughness of his face.
It was the sound that caught him. It held not only the sharply hidden passion he knew lived inside that fragile body, but the last thing he had expected. Fear.
He let her go, felt her stumble away from him as though she could not bear to be near him. Which was, must be, the truth.
What was true for him was that the desire that now terrified her and scored through the hard-won bands of his control was still there. Not lessened by what he had done, but magnified a thousandfold.
"Brand…"
He could not so much as bear to look on her face. The truth forced its way past his parched lips.
"Go, Alina, just go. There is no way that either of us can help the other."
What had she done?
Anna's steps quickened, taking her in endless circles round the walled herb garden of the monastery. The hot afternoon sun beat at her. The scents of the plants teased sense, released where her heavy skirts brushed at them, where an unwary foot bruised leaves: comfrey, horehound, pennyroyal. They whirled past her in dizzying succession. Circular, endless, always the same wherever you turned. Like her life.
Why had she touched him?
Why had she started that dangerous stupidity with the bathwater? Reckless fool. Had she thought that because she had nursed him when he was senseless, slept with him when circumstances had constrained them from going farther, that she was safe? Had she been that stupid? That sure of her own power?
She did not have any. Not where he was concerned.
And he had done nothing to her. Nothing. Just held her in his arms. And that had been enough to dizzy her out of her mind with yearning, to fire her senses until her body melted with it, and the heat inside her was like a fire that consumed thought and will and her whole being.
It had taken away her control. But not his. That had been there in the way he had held her. In what he had chosen to do and what he had not. He was the kind of man who knew all about the power between men and women.
That was what she had wanted him to show her. She had wanted all that mysterious hidden passion to be unleashed, through the fierceness of his body moving on hers, inside her.
And yet she had not wanted it. What she had felt in the end had been tainted by fear. The shameful fear of what he would do, and the fear of how much she wanted him despite that.
Her feet bruised the leaves of white horehound, releasing scent in dizzying waves. Comfrey. Pennyroyal. She sat down on the wooden bench against the wall.
He had not wanted her in the end. She had betrayed him, and all she could do was stay away from him. And remain alone, the way she had always been. It was better so. She buried her head in her hands.
"Alina? What is it? Are you not well?" She was stiff with sitting when she heard it. The deep voice seemed part of her waking dream. The dream she often played out in her head: when her father spoke to her kindly, as though he loved her.
The most unreal dream you could have.
Only one person's voice mimicked the shape and the sound of her father's, their father's.
"I am perfectly well." She did not look up.
"Then what else ails you?" asked Cunan. His hand settled on her shoulder, lightly, as seeming-kind as his voice. Her very own brother. "It was not—the Northumbrian has not offered you insult?"
Her shoulders tightened under the softly placed hand. There was only one Northumbrian to Cunan. Just as there was only one to her. She kept her head lowered in case her half brother could see the remains of the disturbing sexual encounter written on her face, the brand mark of her lover's touch.
"Why should you think there is aught between us? I betrayed him, remember?"
"Betrayal." Cunan's voice hardened, just as her father's always had when they had talked statesmanship. "How is it possible to betray an enemy? In the end you did what was right."
"Did I?"
"Yes. It was Hun that Maol wished for you. Our father wanted you to have a man of purpose, not some lecherous kinsman of a usurper like—"
"Cenred is now King of Northumbria. Cenred holds our brother. I would have thought that—"
"King for how long?"
Something froze in her veins.
"What are you saying?"
"My dear sister, you should be thinking of the future, your future. There are others who would support better claimants to the Northumbrian crown, people more well disposed toward the Picts."
Her blood froze in her veins. "What others?"
"Those whose own futures are at stake. Goadel—"
"Goadel?"
She glanced round the garden, the high walls, the fruiting bushes, the gate. No one. No noise but their voices.
"He would still have you," said Cunan softly,
"Why not? Do you think it matters to a Saxon that you were his brother's? Hardly."
"No…" The word was out before she could stop it. The grip on her shoulder bit through flesh.
"Think of your duty to your birth kingdom."
Her spine straightened. "I tried. But my birth kingdom gave nothing to me. I have never belonged there. Never."
"And whose fault is that?"
Guilt, familiar as a second skin.
"My fault. My mother's. Do we not both know that, you and I? Have we not known it since we were children?" She would give anything to be free of the guilt.
The grip on her shoulder softened.
"Nay," said Cunan's voice, suddenly soft as the hand, full of the elusive tone of Pictland. "Not your fault, your opportunity. Think on it, Alina. What can that English lecher offer you? Do you fancy he loves you?"
The hand moved down her sleeve, scraping coarse wool against her skin. Cunan's hand—
"The Northumbrian is a creature of impulse. Solely. How many women do you think he has had? What would make you special, Alina? You were just one more amusement and a greater trouble to him than he ever expected. All he wants of you is revenge for that trouble."
No. But the word this time was only in her mind. It had no reality at all.
"There are other ways of releasing your brother from Cenred. Better ways than walking straight into the trap of Bamburgh in the keeping of the man you all but destroyed. Do you think he will have a care for your future? No. Only your countrymen can do that, your kindred. In the end, it is your true kin that you are bound to."
Cunan's hand caught hers, lean, hard fingers sliding over the scars that had been put there through her never-spoken longing for just such an impossible tie as that.
As Cunan knew.
"You should have seen the pain in our father's face when he thought for a second time that you were dead."
"I do not believe you."
"That is where your problem lies, Alina, you never believed."
"And you think I should have?"
"Yes." The expression in her brother's eyes stunned her. It might have been her own: the bitter, fathomless need for acceptance. Had she not realized? Not seen? It seemed like a common bond. And Cunan believed—
"You should believe. It was I who first found out that you were alive, not yo
ur Northumbrian. Did you know that? No, do not speak. I can read your face. I always could. After all, we are one blood, are we not?"
Cunan's hand tightened over hers. "Ask him, next time you go to him, your clever light-minded lecher, ask him whether what I say is true." The wiry ringers covered hers, blotting out the scars underneath as though they were no longer there.
"Our needs are the same, Alina. I ask no more than your trust. You will see."
CHAPTER SIX
There was nowhere else to go.
Not unless she wanted to sleep in the hall with the servants, or in the dormitory with the holy brothers.
She stepped over a haphazard drift of rags snoring quietly across the doorway. It did not object. She was its master's wife, after all. She let herself into her husband's chamber.
She had left it till it was well dark, long past the time even the most hale would be sleeping. She did not go near the bed. She hardly dared take two steps into the room in case she woke him. She settled herself on the floor, facing the glowing embers in the hearth.
It took a long time to sleep. All she was aware of in the night quiet was the soft sound of his breathing, more sensed than heard, the knowledge of his presence. The thickness of the surrounding dark.
She woke on a sob, choking it back into silence with the ruthlessness of practice. It was not one of her more pleasant dreams this time. It was a nightmare, the sort that she had had, off and on, since she had been taken back from Strath-Clòta to Pictland at the age of nine.
She had learned to make hardly a sound under such circumstances because it had not been to her advantage to wake either her nurse or any of her sisters. She had been the outsider, isolated by the years of living in another land with her mother, by barriers she had never fully understood. She had learned not to expect companionship or love, or the kind of indulgence her younger sisters still enjoyed at Craig Phádraig.
She lowered her head back onto the hard floor and stared with dream-blind eyes at the smoky thatch of the roof. There was silence except for the pounding of her heart.
She turned her face towards the wall.
"What in heaven's name are you doing on the floor?"
The gasp was unstoppable. Because he was there, right beside her, kneeling on the floor in the dark. The faint glow of the dying embers outlined his body in red-gold and black shadows.
How could he have moved so fast and without a sound in the small confines of the room? She had hardly dared to take a step through the betraying rustle of the rushes on the ground.
Then she saw the gleam of the seax in his hand. Her heart pounded faster than it had in her nightmare.
"At least you did not throw it this time."
"Just as well." The white glitter of his teeth was brighter than the blade.
"Yes. You might have been off your aim again." Only then did she realize they were speaking in Celtic. The way she had with Cunan. Except not so. She shivered at memories of what Cunan had said.
"What would you know about my aim?" enquired the voice that gave life to the brilliant sounds not of Pictland, but of Strath-Clòta.
She bit her lip. He was so very assured, as always. So close and so big in the darkness. She tried not to look at naked skin, at the compressed muscle of his thigh where he knelt beside her. At the blackly shadowed flesh that betokened his manhood. The shivering just got deeper inside. She saw his arm move, the one without the seax, the damaged left one. His hand touched her.
"You are shaking." But now she trembled because she could feel the confident slide of his fingers across the bare skin of her arm, a warm, effortless pressure across her exposed flesh, seemingly careless. Not so at all.
How many women do you think he has had? What would make you special?
"Are you cold? You have only one cloak over you. What were you doing on the floor?"
"Sleeping," she said through the dizzying beat of her own blood in her ears. "Or I would be if people did not keep asking questions and contemplating whether or not to throw things. Besides, where else do you suggest I go?"
"Get in the bed."
"What?"
"You asked for suggestions."
"Yes, but—" The rest was lost as she was hauled to her feet. "I will not—"
The teeth gleamed, quite differently this time, like the invitation of a beast of prey.
"Neither will I. We are both safe from each other on that score. We have proved it, have we not?"
She could not reply. Because of the crippling tightness of her throat. And because she could see and guess the beast of prey's body in the dark: the way the muscle of his thigh moved when he stood and the straight gleaming line of his side. He held her and her bare feet scarcely touched the floor, even though he was wounded, even though he should not have had the strength to take her like that. Her feet lost the floor entirely.
The bed was still faintly warm from the weight of his body. There were a lot of heavy covers. He arranged them. She felt as though the cold had been blocked out. Instantly. Not from furs and wool but from him. Because he was close.
The fire's glow was faint, so that she could scarce see him at all. Just darkness and black shadows. But she knew he was there. One touch away from her skin. Lying beside her, outside the bedcovers.
She tried to find her voice, to regain some control.
"Now it is you who will be cold." She had to fight to keep her tone light, as seeming-careless as his touch.
"No. I have the cloak."
She fancied she could sense the dangerous edge of his breath whisper across her face and her throat. But it was only fancy. He was farther away than she had thought. Always.
"It is you who are ill," said her light voice. "You who should have the bed."
"If I choose to have you in my bed, what do you think should stop me?"
The chills started again, chasing in waves across her skin. Not from cold.
"Only honour," she said into the lightless dark.
"Only what?"
"Honour." She swallowed. "Not mine. Yours."
"What a cutting way with words you have. I had forgotten. But this time, it is you who have missed your aim. Any honour I had was the first thing to die when Hun brought the king's army down on my home."
And his brother had been the second.
"I did not intend what happened to Athelwulf."
The words blurted out without thought. Wildly inappropriate. Lethally dangerous. She heard the hiss of his breath and this time she did feel its touch when he breamed out, like ice vapour on the burning heat across her cheekbone.
"Did you not? Then there are two things we have in common—lack of honour and bootless intentions. My brother Athelwulf, of course, says it was his choice, but then his honour remains—"
"Athelwulf what?"
She sat up through the frightening darkness, every muscle in her body rigid with the shock.
"Surprised I should say that? Or would you disagree with me because your lover had my brother flogged and enslaved?"
The danger in that perfectly cultured voice was unmistakable to her. Her mouth worked. But she was so shocked that no sound came out, which was what saved her.
Because all that beat through her brain were the words Hun did not kill Athelwulf and then the burning thanks to Saint Dwyn that it was true. Even while the sane part of her brain, the one that had made the ruthless decision to part her from the man she had loved and damaged, screamed silent warnings that the words could not be said aloud.
She was supposed to be the despicable creature Hun's whore. She was supposed to know already what had truly happened to Brand's brother.
She heard the faint sound of Brand moving. She tried not to imagine the seax blade or what he must feel in his heart.
"Of course, the only thing you can not know is that I had found Wulf again, because that happened the day I killed Hun. You cannot know what happened after he had been flogged and sold in slavery to that Frisian Goadel found."
The bedc
lothes shifted across her body as his weight moved, intimate as a lover's caress, unfeeling as a stranger's touch.
"My brother made his way back to England. To Wessex. It must have been a shock to Hun when he found out. Your betrothed must have thought Athelwulf was safely away, over the sea. That is, if Hun had not injured him sufficiently for him to die anyway, slowly and in pain."
Some small sound did escape her then. She could not help it.
"Do you not care to face what we two have done? Did you push all that from your mind in the greater knowledge that you were back with what was then one of the most powerful men in Northumbria? That in spite of your little lapse with me, you had secured a triumph for yourself? And, of course, for Pictland? Or do you want to know the rest? How Wulf came to live and Hun to die?"
She forced her head to move on the stiffness of her neck. She could not speak.
"Yet I cannot tell you truly what effort it took for Athelwulf to survive because he would not tell me. No one but him will ever know. But it is not too difficult to guess the times he must have wished that he had died as I believed he had, rather than endure what he did."
The softly breathing darkness seemed so heavy around her, inside and out.
"When did you know he was still alive?" Her voice stretched thin. "How did you find him?"
The silence and the dark remained unbroken for so long that she thought he would not answer. Then she heard the faint rustle of movement as he turned, towards her or away, she did not know.
"He saw me and I—"
He had turned away from her. She could tell by the sound of his voice. The short, cut-off sentence shimmered in the darkness, out of her reach, like him, holding the key to so much that she wished to know about him, about what he felt.
The night air raised gooseflesh for no reason, except that she was still attuned to him in mind as much as body, with the very essence of what she was. And he had said not I saw him, but he saw me. Her skin prickled with a different awareness, the way it did sometimes near clear water, near those dangerous places where other worlds could break through.
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