Embers

by Helen Kirkman

  "What do you mean? Where were you?"

  "In Mercia, trying to disentangle myself from the panicked remnants of the late King Osred's personal guards. They were fleeing down the coast road after witnessing Osred's murder. They thought I might want to stop them. I did not."

  "No." It was a statement of belief. She did not know whether he would accept it. But she took the next step anyway.

  "And your brother?" Such a small question. Yet it was not. The air in the cramped chamber thrummed. She did not know whether he would answer. She thought the great shadow of his head, with its rough tangle of hair, was still turned away from her.

  "In Wessex. Somewhere. There was a clearing among trees and a great sheet of water, very still. The water was freezing."

  The tension in him was palpable, even across the darkness that separated them.

  "Water," she said with infinite care, "is very powerful."

  She let that opening to the possibility of further speech hang between them. She did not ask directly how he had felt the coldness of this particular sheet of water when he had been many miles from it. She simply held her breath.

  The bonds between Brand and his kin were unbreakable. Unlike the bond he had once had with her, a stranger. She bore the silence and waited.

  "If he had not seen me, it is quite likely the axe that splintered my shield and hit my arm would have killed me."

  She stared at the blackness of the steeply-pitched roof. The terror of near death blinded her mind, and with it came the urge to touch him through the dark. To know his wholeness, to forge a connection she could never have.

  All she could do for him was speak, try to make him say what was in his thoughts. She shaped the next question.

  "How did you find your brother?"

  "I kept moving south. Once I knew he was alive I— The woman who now owned my brother had sent a man to seek me. I caught up with her messenger on the Icknield Way. That is how. Quite simple."

  The silence was complete this time, not the slightest rustle of movement in the bated darkness. Not so much as the sound of her breath.

  Quite simple.

  Why had he told her so much?

  The fierce, dazzling creature she had loved had been a warrior, first, last and always. Action had been the compass of his life, not dreams, not the unexplainable, nothing that could not be dealt with in practical terms.

  Or so she had thought.

  Yet even warriors had hearts, minds. They dreamed. Or they could not be human. They just.. they did not admit it.

  Why had he done so? Now? All he had needed to tell her was about the messenger sent to seek him, not what had gone before.

  The tension in the strong, dark bulk of his body was finely wound, lethal. The forbidden urge to touch him, to take some of that tension from him and into herself, was more than she could bear.

  If she could not touch him, she must find the words. But words were so clumsy to express what she felt: such helpless longing for the bond of understanding that had once sparked between them.

  "It happened because your brother means so much to you. Love can make people—"

  "What? What can love make people do?"

  She heard the rustle of his movement, sensed the speed, and then she was looking into the white blur of his face, the feral eyes.

  "Tell me, Alina, what love can make people do."

  It can make people do that which they hate most.

  "I cannot."

  "Nay, I do not believe that you can."

  If only she could not see his eyes. If only she could stop feeling. If only her own need for him had not been enough to make her believe that he could want any comfort from her.

  What he had said concerned his brother. He had said it to underline the closeness of his tie to his kindred. He wanted her to know that that was indissoluble.

  Kin ties.

  It was I who first found out you were alive, not your Northumbrian… Ask him about that…

  But she could not. She forced Cunan's voice out of her head. She knew Brand was not hers. She had always known. .

  She knew it to the depths of her soul.

  He leaned over her, power locked in shadows, despite the traces of fever and exhaustion, despite the wound that would have taken his life but for his brother's love.

  "Hear the ending. When I found Wulf, your lover had tried to buy him back. The request was refused. So Hun came, with all his followers, and with the wolf heads he had hired, so he could take my brother back by force."

  The ending… She knew it beyond doubt.

  "But you were there. You killed him, before he could harm your brother again."

  The gleaming eyes never wavered.

  "Yes."

  She was not able to tell the man she loved that she was deeply, savagely glad that Hun's evil was gone.

  "You have to know how things are. Your lover died at my hand, by the sword you held in that room at the nunnery. This time, I was there. This time I could save my brother. It was not revenge. It was justice. If there can be a difference."

  "There can—" She stopped the words. She would not look at his eyes. He would see through her.

  "What truly makes justice is the fact that after all that happened my brother found a happiness neither you nor I are capable of. He found someone who loved him."

  She buried her face in her hands. But through all the pain of bitterness, ran the strand of fierce gladness—that something had been redeemed for the future, beyond any hope she had ever had, and beyond anything she had ever deserved.

  The bitterness and the gladness seemed to fuse inside her, into a determination that would admit no boundaries. If such things could be redeemed out of the bleakness that filled the world, then it was proof that she had made the right choice.

  The debt she had left to pay was the one that would assure the future.

  Redemption.

  "Can you understand that kind of justice?"

  Yes. The word screamed in her head. Her hands balled themselves into fists against her mouth. There was silence of an intensity that penetrated through flesh and bone while the ripples caused by that word spread out, washing over both of them.

  "Can you?"

  She regathered the threads of her will. The only possibility of redemption for Brand did not lie with her. It was impossible to repay the boon that fate had granted to one brother by damning the other to live on through the nightmare.

  Somewhere outside these walls was Goadel. He wanted her. If she cast herself on Brand's mercy now, he would protect her with his life, whatever she had done to him. Because that was how he was. She could not allow it. She had seen him almost die already.

  "Tell me what goes on in that beautiful head of yours, Alina. Did you fall out with Hun before he died?"

  She could feel the same bone-eating intensity in his voice that had filled the silence. She forced her hands away from her mouth, straightened her hunched shoulders so that she might appear careless.

  "No. It is your turn for disappointment. I had made my choice and this time I was happy with it. I have told you I regret what happened to your brother because he should have had no part in this. I am glad he is…well. But do not flatter yourself that it changes what I wanted."

  "And just what, exactly, did you want?"

  The great black shape of him was closer to her now. She could feel it breathe. Feel the thinly stretched edges of the control that held all that limitless power in place. Her mind sought desperately for the right words to say, the words that would fill the terrifying dark and the silence. The words that would convince a mind that had more depths than she yet knew.

  She fell back on fragments of truth.

  "What I wanted was my place in Me. And I wanted to please my father."

  You should have seen the pain in our father's face when he thought for a second time that you were dead.

  In the end, it is your true kin that you are bound to.

  She swallowed. The fragments of trut
h hurt as much as the lies.

  "You cannot know how it was at Craig Phádraig. My father…" Her mouth felt so dry. "My father and my mother hated each other." She made herself speak through the rawness in her throat "I did not tell you that There was a lot I did not tell you."

  The truth fragments were like daggers. But they would pierce only her.

  "There seems so little time to exchange confidences when you are fleeing pursuit We did not know each other at all, did we?"

  "No."

  She could feel the attention beating at her like waves hitting the cliffs.

  "My mother hated Craig Phádraig. She might have been brought there for marriage, but in her heart she was always a Briton. All she thought of was her home in Strath-Clòta. She was supposed to do the same as me— prop up a useful alliance between two kingdoms who were uneasy neighbours. You have a name for it in English."

  "Frithuwebbe." Peace weaver. The deep-voiced Northumbrian word took shape in the darkness like something you could get hold of. But of course you could not. The web of peace was as fragile as gossamer.

  "It is not an easy thing to do. My mother left my father for a while. She took Modan and me back to Strath-Clòta, to the great palace at Alcluyd. Just a visit to see her own family. I was four when she took me there. By the time my father finally forced her to come back, I was nine.

  "You saw the beauty of Alcluyd before I met you." She took a breath. Brand had seen two years at a court where he had been in much the same position Modan was now in at Bamburgh. "I know you must have hated it there—"

  "Because they wanted to hang me?"

  He moved back, just slightly, control there, cloaking the fire beneath.

  "No. I did not hate it."

  She stared at the huge, shadowed shape. How could he not hate it? The way he must hate her.

  "But how did you survive it? Knowing that your life meant so little that it could be gone at any moment?"

  The gold eyes glittered in reflected firelight.

  "That is how I did survive it—by the moment. How does one survive anything?" His voice was fathoms dark and full of twisting shadows like the air.

  "Besides, nothing is permanent. Sorrow and joy follow each other as hunger follows the feast Even life is only lent."

  That was what all the English believed in their hearts, but the way he said it made her own heart ache inside her chest.

  "So many people have wanted to kill me over the years." The truth of that sent shivers coursing across her skin. So many—Osred, Hun and now Hun's brother outside these walls. And—her brother?

  Kin ties…

  She heard the tormented movement of a body that must ache both with physical pain and all the fires of fury. But when he spoke, his voice was lighter, the darkness pushed aside.

  "At least the Britons of Strath-Clòta had a valid reason for wanting my life. In those days I was constrained to take my turn at representing the late King Osred. That would be enough to make anyone feel like hanging me."

  The sudden lightness held a glimpse of what she longed for. The subtle paths of a mind that understood all the noble and dishonourable, selfless and selfish reasons that compelled people to act as they did. It was that understanding that had made her cast her fate into his hands without the slightest reserve.

  It was that understanding she had to defeat now.

  "I was so happy as a child at Strath-Clòta. I—" She paused. The truth had to be used sparingly now. She took a breath that swallowed the child's feelings.

  "But unlike my mother, I knew where my destiny should lie. I would be a peace weaver. I would do all that I could for my father and my uncle and for Pictland. I would make a success where my mother had failed. I would have…" She could not think of a word that could fit with the monstrous image of Hun. She took a breath that almost choked her. "I would have wealth and security and…power."

  The air froze. There was not a sound. She might have been the only person in the room, but she was not. She could feel him. She could feel him move closer. Without a sound.

  "Is that what you wanted from Hun? Power?"

  The thread of truth was broken. She held herself just as still as him.

  "That is exactly what I wanted from Hun. That was what he could give me. I know that I temporarily lost sight of it when I was with you, and believe me, there is nothing I regret more deeply than that…" Her hands bunched themselves into fists. The remains of her nails dug against her palms.

  "But in the end I came to my senses. In the end I suppose we both had to. I went back to Hun and all was well."

  "All was well?"

  His rough-smooth voice was the deepest whisper in the dark. Something felt with more senses than just hearing. He was so close that the loose, newly-washed fall of his hair brushed her throat, soft as the touch of an angel's wing. And over her, the shadow of his shape.

  Her skin shivered.

  "Was it so?"

  The shadow of his form overwhelmed her and her mind was spinning out of control with her need for him. The hunger of the body, the hunger for completion he had taught her here in this room was tearing through flesh.

  He was not hers. He could never be. She forced deadly words out into the breathlessly charged darkness of their shared bed.

  "Yes, it was so." No need to try and make her voice harsh. It sounded like the croaking of the horn-beaked raven after battle. "All was well with Hun and with me and at last I was doing my duty to my father's land. And I would have my place in the world. Until you came. Just like last time. Only until you came."

  The shadow above her gathered itself, changed shape. Cold air against her throat where there should have been the falling softness of his hair. But behind that coldness was the ice heat of him. She knew the anger was there, deep inside him. She knew all of its causes and she could only guess at its power.

  If he had been Hun he would have killed her for what she had done. She thought his body was stronger than Hun's. She knew it was. She had touched it too intimately. She had learned the beginnings of its power. The rest was a matter of instinct.

  Of course there were other ways for men to take their revenge. She had wanted him before, when he had held her in his arms. Her body had shown him. But now there could be only hate in his heart.

  Only hate. His body above her blocked out the light.

  She thought of her father and her mother, and the blackness was tearing its way into her mind—

  "Then sleep well, this time, Alina. You will need strength."

  "What… Where are you going…"

  There was air above her. Emptiness. Emptiness that would kill her soul.

  "We leave for Bamburgh in five days. Tell your brother, the Strathclyde Hound. He needs to be ready. So do you."

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Her clothes were gone.

  Alina blinked in the half-light The dark shapes spread out before the fire to dry after her unhandy attempt at washing were not there.

  She sat up. The thick coverings of Brand's bed pooled round her and the cold struck her skin. She hugged her arms protectively around herself. But there was no one to see.

  She slept alone.

  She had scarce seen Brand for the last three days. She did not know where he was or what he did.

  She stared at the space where the tattered shapes of her tunic and undergown should be and then she saw it. Them. A pair of saddlebags draped over the foot of her bed.

  Her skin shivered with an awareness beyond cold. Recognition. Even though it was scarce light. Even though the fine leather bags with the silver buckles had had their existence in another life.

  They were hers.

  They held all the things she had taken with her on her mad flight from Hun. Her only possessions. She scrambled across the bed and ripped open the buckles. An expanse of fine, deep blue linen trimmed with silk ribbons spilled out. She stared at it. It shimmered in a mixture of dawn light and firelight from the hearth.

  It was beautiful. It had mad
e her look beautiful. Or so…people had said.

  So she had kept it, her fine and costly dress, even though it was totally impractical for a dangerous journey into exile. It had been the first thing Brand had seen her in.

  He had looked at her and the heat in his eyes had scorched inside her. No one had ever looked at her like that before. No one ever would again.

  She buried her face in its soft folds. The silk from Byzantium was like cool gossamer against her face.

  Why was it there? Why had he kept everything that was hers? Everything that she had been unable to take with her when she had fled from him into the south?

  She delved deeper. It was all there: cloak and gowns, stockings and underlinen and even, unexpected blessing from heaven, a pair of shoes that would fit.

  She put them on.

  She did not dress herself in the silk, but in a fine wool tunic of forest-green over a gown of paler green. It was warm, soft against her skin.

  Without the slightest regret for the wimple, she fastened a delicate linen head rail round her hair with a ribbon of twisted coloured thread.

  There was no such thing as a mirror in a monastery, but… She realized what he had done.

  He had forced her to recreate the person she had been before she had abandoned him to ride south. Perhaps even the person she had been before she had met him. She began to shake.

  "Will you come, lady?"

  Duda, pounding on the door fit to wake the dead. She cast one wild glance around the room as though she might still find the protection of her plain nun's clothing.

  She would have to go out looking like this.

  She opened the door. Duda stared. Then he turned away.

  She followed him into the courtyard.

  Brand was waiting for her. His eyes, when they lighted on the ghost of what had been, held the fire that had called her blood across the painted torchlit hall at Bamburgh. But this time it could only be from anger, not desire. Her hand went instinctively to the frivolous scrap of veil around her head, drawing its edges closer, as though she could hide her face from him.