Embers

by Helen Kirkman

  "Go." It was the harshest sound she had ever heard. "Take your freedom while it is there."

  All that was in her mind and her body seemed to gather itself into what he had called single-minded-ness and she named courage.

  "I will not go. The only freedom I have ever had has been with you." She thought her voice sounded as harsh as his. Because she felt so much. Because of all that she risked.

  "I told you the kind of love I wanted. It was a love that valued me for what I was, not for whatever potential power over others I represented. Only you gave me that. Not my father or my mother, or even my childhood dreams at Alcluyd. It is the kind of love that I would give in my turn, if you would let me."

  She let her body rest against his and felt his warmth.

  "You do not know what your love is. It is so complete because it gives. If you had been a man like my father, you would have used all the strength you have, and what you are pleased to call madness, to constrain me regardless of what I wanted."

  She took a breath. "You had the right to kill my father but you did not. If you had fought only for yourself you would have used the sword's power to take. You would not have used it to protect me and everyone else. You would not have given me back my life and the freedom to go to Strath-Clòta."

  She touched him and yet he held back. Because he had more control than her, always. He watched her and she tried to hold that gaze, to meet its terms.

  "You wanted me to have what no one else has ever thought for me to have. You wanted me to have power over my own life."

  The faint flicker in the gold eyes was all that she needed. Perhaps. With a recklessness that should have outshone his, she staked the last throw of the dice.

  "I have made my choice. I will go to Lindwood with you. Not out of guilt, not out of fear, not even out of the obligation I have to you that is more than I could ever repay." She forestalled the sudden movement of his body with a quickness that exceeded mere thought.

  "My choice is just as selfish as you could wish." Her voice trembled against his skin. "The way I love you does not know any restraint at all. You are what I want and what I have always wanted. My happiness does not lie in Strath-Clòta or in Craig Phádraig. It lies in you."

  Her body slid across his, gently, with all the slowness of a lifetime's promise.

  "If you take that happiness away from me, you take everything. I tried…I tried once to do without you and I could not. It was like living death. I need you more than I have ever needed anyone, just as I have trusted you more than I have trusted anyone. That is the measure of my love, if you will take it."

  The failing edge of her breath was caught under the wild blood-tingling deepness of his mouth and there was nothing but his heat and the knowing mind-burning touch of his hands. And the pleasure. Only that.

  She could not move afterwards. Her hands shook. Every muscle in her body shook. It was bliss. It was all that she wanted. She lay, sated, surfeited with happiness while the light and the shadows danced across them on the moving northern air.

  "So you will take me to Lindwood, then?"

  The happiness was real, there under her hand in the hot flesh and the scent of him. She felt him sigh, a sound that was drawn out and filled with suffering. The cool edge of it teased her burning skin.

  "Aye. I suppose I will have to now."

  Northumbrian hell-fiend.

  She tried reaching a hand out to hit him, preferably across the ribs, but it was too much effort. He pulled the wreckage of the bedcovers round her but she did not need that. He was her warmth. Now. For ever. Even though she had thought she had lost him to the ice cold. She closed her eyes and her thanks went where they were due, straight to Saint Dwyn, who guarded lovers.

  "Aye," she said in Northumbrian, staring at starlight beyond the window. "Now that you have seduced me—" she produced a sigh to rival his for poignancy "—you will have to marry me."

  "Nay… Will I have to go that far?"

  "Yes."

  She twisted her fingers in the rich gold tangle of his hair and pulled. Hard.

  "Argh. Well, if you are going to browbeat me into it—"

  "I am. Give me two minutes and I will have the sword at your throat again. Ah—"

  "You were saying?"

  "Possibly that I would never touch the sword again. I do not think I want to know where you learned to kiss like that."

  "Some Pictish wench I met."

  His flesh filled her hands. She felt very, very safe.

  "What do you think my…my father will say?"

  "Yes."

  Her fingers tangled in his hair again while she digested this spare Northumbrian reply. "I will marry you anyway." Her fingers snagged in living gold. "There will be no escape. But…what if he does not say yes?"

  His own hand, lost in the wild and longer tangle of her hair, was much more gentle. Probably because he was kinder than her. He appeared to be considering.

  "Then I suppose I will just have to abduct you again."

  She let out her breath.

  "Would you do that?"

  "Well, think of all the practice I have had. Be a shame to waste it, and I might get it right the third time."

  "Aye," she said in her best Northumbrian. "You might…" She allowed a certain inflexion of irony. It was rewarded with the kind of kiss that stopped breath. It was quite enough to stop her heart.

  "Do you think that—" Her voice faltered and she tried to collect it. "Do you think that people, the peo-pie at Lindwood will accept me after all that has happened?"

  "No one who sees you could fail to fall under your spell."

  "Nay, but…you just say that because you are susceptible." She proved it with the boldness he had taught her, but her hands clung to him with a need for reassurance that he recognized. Because he knew her. She was drawn into the utterly warm, utterly quiet circle of his arms. Safe. No one could combine such safety and such wildness. He stroked her hair.

  "They know who is to blame, and it is not you. There is much to be made up to them and I would do it."

  "They haunted your bower while you were ill. They love you—"

  "As they will love you."

  "I would do all for that."

  She thought of the dead. Hun and Goadel. They had no more power. Not unless she gave it to them. She turned her face towards him.

  "I would help you rebuild your home if I could."

  "Our home. Then that is what we will do. And whatever happens we will abide it. Together."

  "Aye."

  She leaned her head against his shoulder and the promise filled the intimate darkness of the Northumbrian air.

  EPILOGUE

  Lindwood, Northumbria, 718 a.d.

  Alina watched the cloud of dust rising in the summer heat. Two years and the circle was almost complete. At her back stood the people of Lindwood, in front stood Brand, like a shield against harm. Always.

  The riders swept to a halt and the leader sprang down, lithe and powerful as the creature he had been named for.

  "Wulf." Brand did not move. She could not.

  The man so like and so unlike her husband scanned what had once been his home. His eyes were very different from Brand's, grey, dense as slate.

  "You rebuilt the chapel."

  "Aye. Do you want to see what else is here? Something you can take back to benighted Wessex with you. Books."

  "You? And books?" The grey eyes struck light. They were not hard at all. They were like Brand's eyes, full of the strength that allowed people to give.

  "Aye," said Brand, but it was buried under his brother's embrace.

  "Benighted, indeed," drawled the soft tones of Wessex that belonged to Wulf's elegant, fair-haired wife. But whatever else she would have said was lost in a round of embraces that never seemed to end.

  It was like a miracle. They went inside and the soaring roof and the painted pillars of the hall reflected laughter.

  There seemed so much that required laughter. From all of them. T
he bright-eyed girl of the lady Rowena's first marriage giggled, her eyes resting equally on her mother and Wulf. The lady's little son by her marriage to Wulf crowed loudly, hale and lusty with health.

  Alina watched them, cradling her own son, the small weight of him in her arms like heaven's blessing.

  The lady Rowena wanted to hold him. But when she did, her fine blue eyes softened with tears.

  Alina stared at the elegant fairness and the intimidating beauty of Wulf's wife. "I thought you would hate me for the harm I have done."

  "Nay." The lady watched the child. "I know too much of what it is like to be caught in events beyond your control."

  It made Alina dare the next words. "I was afraid that your husband would hate me for having Lindwood."

  "So was I." There was a pause and then Rowena said, "I did not want him to regret what he gave up to be with me."

  Alina's heart caught and they looked at each other with an understanding that did not need words.

  Rowena's gaze slid away to where Wulf sat with Brand, their heads bent over the books Brand had had copied at Jarrow for his brother. At that moment Wulf looked up and something in the slate-grey eyes made all the cool fairness of Rowena catch fire.

  She watched Wulf's smile broaden. It was shadowless. Then Brand's gaze caught her own and there was nothing but the brightness of him, the light and the fire. All the possibility of regret seemed swallowed up by the greater power of the future.

  "Wulf is happy," said Alina. It was hours later. They were lying on the great canopied bed and the darkness was threaded with firelight.

  "Aye."

  It was all that Brand said, but she could read Northumbrians. They could pack something as large and unfathomable as redemption into one short word. She thought the past was healed and the sorrow was gone, even the blame that Brand had kept for himself.

  "Will you keep any of the books?"

  "Just one."

  Brand shifted the weight of their son against his chest.

  "Even if it gets into your head and stays there forever?"

  "Why do you think I had another copy made of Boethius?"

  Boethius who wrote not of transience but of the permanent joys of the spirit

  The firelight flickered in the Bernician air but it was nothing to Brand's warmth.

  "Because you are happy?"

  "Aye."

  Alina leaned her head against his shoulder and the peace stole through her heart. The circle was complete.

  HISTORICAL NOTE ON THE YEAR 716

  The northern English kingdom of Northumbria lived dangerously. Its sporadic fights were internal, as well as with neighbouring kingdoms such as that of the Picts (northeastern Scotland) and the Mercians (English midlands).

  King Cenred reigned two years before being replaced by Osric, brother of his predecessor and rival, King Osred. But a compromise must have been hammered out because Osric named Cenred's brother Ceolwulf as his heir.

  Ceolwulf managed to hold the throne (with one interruption) for nine years and was immortalized as "most glorious" by that most famous Anglo-Saxon historian, Bede.

  Bede believed that if history recorded good things of good men, the thoughtful hearer would be encouraged to imitate what was good.

  Arts such as the writing, copying and reading of books flourished in Northumbria with a success that defied political turmoil.

  Apart from the kings, all the characters in the book are imaginary. The background against which they struggled and triumphed is as real as the author can make it

  * * * * *

  Dear Reader,

  Sometimes we meet another person by chance and sometimes we seem to meet a special stranger by fate.

  I wanted to create a story for a woman who finds just such a magic stranger at a desperate crisis of her life.

  The lady Gemma knows the danger of helping the unconscious man lying at the forest eaves, but she will not leave him to die. As the wounded man recovers, her faith seems justified. But the stranger hides secrets. He is a man trapped between two worlds, belonging nowhere.

  Ash lives under the taint of disloyalty, haunted by a past he can share with no one, least of all with a lady, a skilled goldsmith dedicated to her task of creating beauty. He is a warrior, sworn to the service of a king who stands alone against the invading Viking armies.

  But Gemma and her captive brother face danger. Ash stands at the crossroads, between the demands of his mission and keeping faith with the woman whose trust he would win above all others. The prize is beyond hope—the kind of love that would bring him home.

  The king to whom Ash swore faith was real. Alfred the Great, King of Wessex, finally turned back the sweeping invasion of the Viking forces. I hope you enjoy A Fragile Trust, the first of my tales that cele-brate the spirit of the men and women who kept faith with their king in those dangerous times.

  Helen Kirkman

  A FRAGILE TRUST

  by Helen Kirkman

  Coming in April 2005 from HQN Books

  Chapter Excerpt

  The Mercian border, England

  Spring, 872 a.d.

  "Stop," shrieked Gemma. "The man is alive."

  The horse and cart lurched to a halt so abrupt it nearly threw her.

  Gemma's gaze fixed on the heap of rags beside the track. She could make out the startling breadth of the man's shoulders under the torn wool, glimpse the bare thickness of a muddied thigh.

  She leaped down while the cart was still rocking.

  "Don't! Lady, stop. There could be others, waiting for you to go near the trees—"

  But she would not stop. The figure of the man drew her. She watched the dark shape: motionless, damaged, infinitely mysterious. The pale gleam of uncovered flesh.

  The naked skin belonged to the strong sinuous length of his leg stretched out in the damp bracken beside her. She stared at the gaping cloth, the taut swell of muscle exposed beneath; at the blackened slashing line of what could only be a sword cut.

  Naught about him was what she had expected. She had thought him one of the poor, starving wretches who haunted the countryside in the wake of the Viking raids. Heaven knew there were enough of them.

  But swelling muscles did not belong to starving men and while his wounds could be those of a robber's helpless victim, she felt in her bones that this man had fought. And there had been a skirmish, quite recently, which the Vikings had won. She had heard their boasts.

  He was filthy. He was completely alone.

  He was lying facedown. The broad battered width of his hand was wrapped, nay clamped, round a tree root, as though if he could no longer walk forward, he would crawl.

  A warrior's hand.

  She despised warriors.

  The temptation to give in to good sense was almost overwhelming. The battered man was a stranger, worse, a soldier. For all she knew he could be Danish, some Viking ambushed in revenge, set upon and left for dead.

  She let go of the man's sleeve, wiping her hand clean. Dried leaves shed cold and dampness against her skin. Mud and…blood.

  What if he died?

  She could not tear her gaze from the stranger, from the heavy, outstretched warrior's hand.

  Her own hand slid forward, reaching out until her fingers touched the stranger's flesh. She could feel each separate knuckle of that fierce grip. His skin was freezing. She could not pry his fingers free.

  "I cannot leave him." She scarce knew whether she had spoken aloud.

  In that moment, the stranger moved.

  His eyes were the colour of the forest, dun shadows and green light, so deep they did not seem to belong to a world dweller but to a spirit, a wood-wose. Deep beyond imagining.

  Sudden fire seemed to erupt around her, despite the cold—wild, fast forest fire. The wood-dark eyes burned into hers. The spine-crawling silence of the air beat against her ears.

  "Who are you?" The English words, deep as the earth's fastness, seemed not to break the tingling silence, but to be part of it.
His voice demanded an answer. Yet it hurt him to speak. She could tell that from the tautness of his mouth, the heaviness of his breath. His speech was not Danish. It was as Mercian as hers.

  That did not take away one iota of the danger.

  "I am Gemma."

  "A jewel, then."

  His gaze held hers. The strange wildfire inside her kindled, coursing through her veins, making her whole body burn, so that sight and feeling and sense dizzied with the power of it. It was like the rush of the strongest mead.

  The mysterious male creature under her hand had made her feel that.

  Beside her the lifeless fronds of last year's bracken crackled and the sharp snap of winter-hard twigs broke the spell.

  A kind of panic leaped inside her. She was mad to linger here beside the dark bulk of the forest filled with outlaws and thieves and the bitter dispossessed.

  "Lady, come away."

  The hazel gaze flickered past her to the grimness of her escort's face before turning back to her. All at once, the strained face seemed not that of an otherworldly spirit, but man-kindred, human, and therefore vulnerable despite its evident will.

  He would ask for her aid. He must. She knew, with a startling completeness, that she would not refuse him. The urge to reassure him, to respond to the humanness that she saw, to tell him he was not alone, cut through mind and flesh.

  "It is all right. I will not leave you. I will help you—"

  "Nay." The word was forced out of him, like an act of will, and she understood what she should have known the moment she had seen his hand. He would not beg for anything.

  "You must leave me—"

  Not a reproach, not a plea. It was a command.

  "No—"

  "You must go. I will bring you danger."

  Danger. Her skin, the very air around her, shivered with it.

  "No." She tried to hold the shifting brightness of his eyes, to tell him without words what the breath-less tingling air told her. Things she did not know herself. That there was more to this than a chance meeting of strangers, that a bond had been made, of what kind or how was beyond her understanding. It was just there.