by Nora Roberts
people from starvation.”
“You run low on fuel.”
“Yes. The men will cut another tree in a few days.” It always pained her to order it. For each tree cut meant one fewer left. Though the forest was thick and vast, without new growth there would someday be no more.
“Deirdre, how long can you go on this way?”
“As long as we must.”
“It’s not enough.” Temper that he hadn’t realized was building inside him burst out. He cast the bucket aside and grabbed her hands.
She’d been waiting for this. Through the joy, through the sweetness, she’d known the storm would come. The storm that would end the time out of time. He was healed now, and a warrior prince, so healed, could not abide monotony.
“It’s enough,” she said calmly, “because it’s what we have.”
“For how much longer?” he demanded. “Ten years? Fifty?”
“For as long as there is.”
Though she tried to pull away, he turned her hands over. “You work them raw, haul buckets like a milkmaid.”
“Should I sit on my throne with soft white hands folded and let my people work?”
“There are other choices.”
“Not for me.”
“Come with me.” He gripped her arms now, tight, firm, as if he held his own life.
Oh, she’d dreamed of it, in her most secret heart. Riding off with him, flying through the forest and away to beyond. Toward the sun, the green, the flowers.
Into summer.
“I can’t. You know I can’t.”
“We’ll find the way out. When we’re home, I’ll gather men, horses, provisions. I’ll come back for your people. I swear it to you.”
“You’ll find the way out.” She laid her hands on his chest, over the thunder of his heart. “I believe it. If I didn’t I would have you chained before I’d allow you to leave. I won’t risk your death. But the way back. . .” She shook her head, turned away from him when his grip relaxed.
“You don’t believe I’ll come back.”
She closed her eyes because she didn’t believe it, not fully. How could he turn his back on the sun and risk everything to travel here again for what he’d known for only a few weeks? “Even if you tried, there’s no certainty you’d find us again. Your coming was a miracle. Your safe passage home will be another. I don’t ask for three in one lifetime.”
She drew herself up. “I won’t ask for your life, nor will I accept it. I will send a man with you—my best, my strongest—if you will take him. If you will give him good horses, and provisions, I will send others if the gods show him the way back again.”
“But you won’t leave.”
“I’m bound to stay, as you are bound to go.” She turned back, and though tears stung her throat, her eyes were dry. “It’s said that if I leave here while winter holds this place, Rose Castle will vanish from sight, and all within will be trapped for eternity.”
“That’s nonsense.”
“Can you say that?” She gestured to the white sky above the dome. “Can you be sure of it? I am queen of this world, and I am prisoner.”
“Then bid me stay. You’ve only to ask it of me.”
“I won’t. And you can’t. First, you’re destined to be king. It is your fate, and I have seen the crown you’ll wear inside your own mind and heart. And more, your family would grieve and your people mourn. With that on your conscience, the gift we found together would be forever tainted. One day you would go in any case.”
“So little faith in me. I ask you this: Do you love me?”
Her eyes filled, sheened, but the tears did not fall. “I care for you. You brought light inside me.”
“ ‘Care’ is a weak word. Do you love me?”
“My heart is frozen. I have no love to give.”
“That is the first lie you’ve told me. I’ve seen you cuddle a fretful babe in your arms, risk your life to save a small boy.”
“That is a different matter.”
“I’ve been inside you.” Frustrated fury ran over his face. “I’ve seen your eyes as you opened to me.”
She began to tremble. “Passion is not love. Surely my father had passion for my mother, for her sister. But love he had for neither. I care for you. I desire you. That is all I have to give. The gift of a heart, woman to man, has doomed me.”
“So because your father was feckless, your mother foolish, and your aunt vindictive, you close yourself off from the only true warmth there is?”
“I can’t give what I don’t have.”
“Then take this, Deirdre of the Sea of Ice. I love you, and I will never love another. I leave tomorrow. I ask you again, come with me.”
“I can’t. I can’t,” she repeated, taking his arm. “I beg you. Our time is so short, let us not have this chill between us. I’ve given you more than ever I gave a man. I pledge to you now there will never be another. Let it be enough.”
“It isn’t enough. If you loved, you’d know that.” One hand gripped the hilt of his sword as if he would draw it and fight what stood between them. Instead, he stepped back from her. “You make your own prison, my lady,” he said, and left her.
Alone, Deirdre nearly sank to her knees. But despair, she thought, would solve no more than Kylar’s bright sword would. So she picked up the pail.
“Why didn’t you tell him?”
Deirdre jolted, nearly splashing water over the rim. “You have no right to listen to private words, Orna.”
Ignoring the stiff tone, Orna came forward to heft the bag of turnips. “Hasn’t he the right to know what may break the spell?”
“No.” She said it fiercely. “His choices, his actions must be his own. He is entitled to that. He won’t be influenced by a sense of honor, for his honor runs through him like his blood. I am no damsel who needs rescuing by a man.”
“You are a woman who is loved by one.”
“Men love many women.”
“By the blood, child! Will you let those who made you ruin you?”
“Should I give my heart, take his, at the risk of sacrificing all who depend on me?”
“It doesn’t have to be that way. The curse—”
“I don’t know love.” When she whirled around, her face was bright with temper. “How can I trust what I don’t know? She who bore me couldn’t love me. He who made me never even looked on my face. I know duty, and I know the tenderness I feel for you and my people. I know joy and sadness. And I know fear.”
“It’s fear that traps you.”
“Haven’t I the right to fear?” Deirdre demanded. “When I hold lives in my hands, day and night? I cannot leave here.”
“No, you cannot leave here.” The undeniable truth of that broke Orna’s heart. “But you can love.”
“And loving, risk trapping him in this place. This cold place. Harsh payment for what he’s given me. No, he leaves on the morrow, and what will be will be.”
“And if you’re with child?”
“I pray I am, for it is my duty.” Her shoulders slumped. “I fear I am, for then I will have imprisoned his child, our child, here.” She pressed a hand to her stomach. “I dreamed of a child, Orna, nursing at my breast and watching me with my lover’s eyes, and what moved through me was so fierce and strong. The woman I am would ride away with him to save what grows inside me. The queen cannot. You will not speak of this to him, or anyone.”
“No, my lady.”
Deirdre nodded. “Send Dilys to me, and see that provisions are set aside for two men. They will have a long and difficult journey. I await Dilys in the parlor.”
She set the bucket aside and walked quickly away.
Before going inside, Orna hurried through the archway and into the rose garden.
When she saw that the tiny leaf she’d watched unfurl from a single green bud was withering, she wept.
9
EVEN pride couldn’t stop her from going to him. When time was so short there was no room for pr
ide in her world. She brought him gifts she hoped he would accept.
And she brought him herself.
“Kylar.” She waited at his chamber door until he turned from the window where he stared out at the dark night. So handsome, she thought, her dark prince. “Would you speak with me?”
“I’m trying to understand you.”
That alone, that he would try, lightened her heart. “I wish you could.” She came forward and laid what she carried on the chest by his bed. “I’ve brought you a cloak, since yours was ruined. It was my grandfather’s, and with its lining of fur is warmer than what you had. It befits a prince. And this brooch that was his. Will you take it?”
He crossed to her, picked up the gold brooch with its carved rose. “Why do you give it to me?”
“Because I treasure it.” She lifted a hand, closed it over his on the brooch. “You think I don’t cherish what you’ve given me, what you’ve been to me. I can’t let you leave believing that. I can’t bear the thought of you going when there’s anger and hard words between us.”
There was a storm in his eyes as they met hers. “I could take you from here, whether you’re willing or not. No one could stop me.”
“I would not allow it, nor would my people.”
He stepped closer, and circled her throat with his hand with just enough force that the pulse against his palm fluttered with fear. “No one could stop me.” His free hand clamped over hers before she could draw her dagger. “Not even you.”
“I would never forgive you for it. Nor lie willingly with you again. Anger makes you think of using force as an answer. You know it’s not.”
“How can you be so calm, and so sure, Deirdre?”
“I’m sure of nothing. And I am not calm. I want to go with you. I want to run and never look back, to live with you in the sunlight. To once smell the grass, to breathe the summer. Once,” she said in a fierce whisper. “And what would that make me?”
“My wife.”
The hand under his trembled, then steadied before she drew it away. “You honor me, but I will never marry.”
“Because of who made you, how you were made?” He took her by the shoulders now so that their gazes locked. “Can you be so wise, so warm, Deirdre, and at the same time so cold and closed?”
“I will never marry because my most sacred trust is to do no harm. If I were to take a husband, he would be king. I would share the welfare of all my people with him. This is a heavy burden.”
“Do you think I would shirk it?”
“I don’t, no. I’ve been inside your mind and heart. You keep your promises, Kylar, even if they harm you.”
“So you spurn me to save me?”
“Spurn you? I have lain with you. I have shared with you my body, my mind, as I have never shared with another. Will never share again in my lifetime. If I take your vow and keep you here, if you keep your vow and stay, how many will be harmed? What destinies would we alter if you did not take your place as king in your own land? And if I went with you, my people would lose hope. They would have no one to look to for guidance. No one to heal them. There is no one here to take my place.”
She thought of the child she knew grew inside her.
“I accept that you must go, and honor you for it,” she said. “Why can’t you accept that I must stay?”
“You see only black and white.”
“I know only black and white.” Her voice turned desperate now, with a pleading he’d never heard from her. “My life, the whole of it, has been here. And one single purpose was taught to me. To keep my people alive and well. I’ve done this as best I can.”
“No one could have done better.”
“But it isn’t finished. You want to understand me?” Now she moved to the window, pulled the hangings over the black glass to shut out the dark and the cold. “When I was a babe, my mother gave me to Orna. I never remember my mother’s arms around me. She was kind, but she couldn’t love me. I have my father’s eyes, and looking at me caused her pain. I felt that pain.”
She pressed her hands to her heart. “I felt it inside me, the hurt and the longing and the despair. So I closed myself off from it. Hadn’t I the right?”
There was no room for anger in him now. “She had no right to turn from you.”
“She did turn from me, and that can’t be changed. I was tended well, and taught. I had duties, and I had playmates. And once, when I was very young there were dogs. They died off, one by one. When the last . . . his name was Griffen—a foolish name for a dog, I suppose. He was very old, and I couldn’t heal him. When he died, it broke something in me. That’s foolish, too, isn’t it, to be shattered by the death of a dog.”
“No. You loved him.”
“Oh, I did.” She sat now, with a weary sigh. “So much love I had for that old hound. And so much fury when I lost him. I was mad with grief and tried to destroy the ice rose. I thought if I could chop it down, hack it to bits, all this would end. Somehow it would end, for even death could never be so bleak. But a sword is nothing against magic. My mother sent for me. There would be loss, she told me. I had to accept it. I had duties, and the most vital was to care for my people. To put their well-being above my own. She was right.”
“As a queen,” Kylar agreed. “But not as a mother.”
“How could she give what she didn’t have? I realize now, with her bond with the animals, she must have felt grief as I did for the loss. She was grief, my mother. I watched her pine and yearn for the man who’d ruined her. Even as she died, she wept for him. His deceit, his selfishness stole the color and warmth from her life, and doomed her and her people to eternal winter. Yet she died loving him, and I vowed that nothing and no one would ever rule my heart. It is trapped inside me, as frozen as the rose in the tower of ice outside this window. If it were free, Kylar, I would give it to you.”
“You trap yourself. It’s not a sword that will cut through the ice. It’s love.”
“What I have is yours. I wish it could be more. If I were not queen, I would go with you on the morrow. I would trust you to take me to beyond, or would die fighting to get there with you. But I can’t go, and you can’t stay. Kylar, I saw your mother’s face.”
“My mother?”
“In your mind, your heart, when I healed you. I would have given anything, anything, to have seen such love and pride for me in the eyes of the one who bore me. You can’t let her grieve for a son who still lives.”
Guilt clawed at him. “She would want me happy.”
“I believe she would. But if you stay, she will never know what became of you. Whatever you want for yourself, you have too much inside you for her to leave her not knowing. And too much honor to turn away from your duties to your family and your own land.”
His fists clenched. She had, with the skill of a soldier, outflanked him. “Does it always come to duty?”
“We’re born what we’re born, Kylar. Neither you nor I could live well or happy if we cast off our duty.”
“I would rather face a battle without sword or shield than leave you.”
“We’ve been given these weeks. If I ask you for one more night, will you turn me away?”
“No.” He reached for her hand. “I won’t turn you away.”
HE loved her tenderly, then fiercely. And at last, when dawn trembled to life, he loved her desperately. When the night was over, she didn’t cling, nor did she weep. A part of him wished she would do both. But the woman he loved was strong, and helped him prepare for his journey without tears.
“There are rations for two weeks.” She prayed it would be enough. “Take whatever you need from the forest.” As he cinched the saddle on his horse, Deirdre slipped a hand under his cloak, laid it on his side.