by Lara Adrian
"And good morrow to the both of you as well," replied a young woman who strode the narrow path through the heart of the woods.
With fingers gloved in supple leather, she lifted the skirt of her simple ecru bliaut and continued on her way, her bare feet glistening with the dew that yet covered the ground from the previous night's storm. It had been a virulent tempest of crashing thunder and bright, streaking lightning, uncustomary for the time of year, and not a little terrifying. Her mother had feared for their very lives, shrieking with each rattling clap of thunder that shook their humble cottage.
Not so, Serena.
She had been secretly thrilled with the immensity of the storm. So little of the unusual touched her, here in the sanctuary of the far-flung forest that had been her home all the nineteen years of her existence. She was protected here, and while she enjoyed the peace and simplicity of the life she lived with her dear mother, something peculiar had begun to stir within her of late. That stirring urged her toward reckless thoughts--toward wilder shores than the one that stretched in a sandy line on the other side of the woodland grove.
It was toward that familiar beach that Serena wandered now, her thoughts trailing over the routine tasks that awaited her back at the cottage. There were herbs to be cut, a garden to be weeded, linens to be laundered, floors to be swept....
Mundanity, all of it, she reflected with a sigh. Her mother had set her about her morning's duties some time ago, but once Calandra's watchful eyes were turned, Serena had taken the opportunity to stray in search of more interesting diversions. The call of the rolling surf whispered of adventure, and she followed it with eager feet.
Serena emerged from the forest edge and paused, eyes closed as she tipped her face up into the sun and breathed deeply of the crisp, briny air. Her toes sank into the warm brown sand, the smooth grains still damp and packed firm from the rains that had come so feverishly overnight.
Her senses filled with the wide openness of the world before her. The unbound mass of her long dark hair lifted and swirled about her, tickling streamers caught on the breeze, blowing unfettered. She heard the throaty cry of a seabird and opened her eyes to see a snowy white gull sweeping overhead. She delighted in its arcing flight, smiling as it dipped and soared in effortless freedom above the beach. Some score-and-a-few paces ahead of her, the ocean lapped in froth-curled waves, rolling onto the shore in a playful tumble.
Serena strode toward the water with a barely stifled giggle of joy--and abruptly stopped not halfway there.
A large, bulky shape drew her gaze askance, to where a clump of seaweed-strewn debris lay a short distance down the beach, just at the water's edge. She shielded her eyes from the sun's glare with an upraised hand, peering at what looked to be an unfortunate sea creature tossed ashore and unmoving in the sand. Intrigued, saddened for the lifeless beast that likely perished amid the storm, Serena began to approach it, silently intoning a prayer of compassion.
She could not have been more shocked when she glimpsed the pale tones of human flesh shrouded in the dark, twisted strands of water vines. It was a man, she realized at once, her eyes widening as she gaped at thick muscled arms and a bare torso slashed with angry lacerations. Bright red blood trailed from his wounds, and from a cut that had split his dark brow. The thin rivulets gathered and twisted in a small pool of saltwater that had accumulated around him. His clothing was common enough--what little remained of it. The man wore only tattered hose and braies, all of him looking battered and forlorn, so alone.
Where had he come from?
Serena pivoted her head to scan the rest of the beach, looking for clues to his origin. If he had been shipwrecked, there was no trace of other victims, nor of the vessel that might have carried him into the storm. The man lay half on his chest, his right shoulder dug into the moist sand, his cheek resting on the beach as if he slept. Seaweed and the spiky fall of his dark brown hair obscured what little she could see of his face. He gripped the strap of a leather satchel in his fist, his knuckles gone white with the ferocity of his hold.
"Whoever you are, I pray you did not suffer in your final moments," Serena whispered, feeling a wash of sorrow for the man at her feet.
She bent her head in a somber reflection, her gaze narrowing on him. A wave reached for him then, swirling about his legs and gently rocking his motionless body as the tidal rush lapped at him, then receded back into the sea. As his solid bulk shifted, something metallic glinted at the base of his strong neck--a pendant chain, its links seeming far too delicate for a man of his size. Perhaps it would tell her something of who he was, or where he came from.
Curious, Serena retrieved a long stick from nearby and came to stand beside him. Her fingers trembled within the leather encasement of her gloves.
Never lay your hands on one of them. You must never allow yourself so close to a man that he could taint you with his wickedness.
Her mother's warning issued in Serena's head as if Calandra stood at her side. The words were as much a part of her as breathing, cautionary advice she had heard countless times since her birth.
Never touch, child, for their kind will bring you only pain.
Serena caught her lip between her teeth. Surely there was naught to fear from this lifeless stranger. She gripped the stick more firmly, mustering her courage. The sun-bleached length of wood hovered at the man's bulky shoulder, its wavering tip belying her apprehension to put herself so close as to touch this man, even with more than an arm's length of hard oak between them. Serena placed the tip of the stick against his arm and quickly nudged him over.
He rolled gracelessly onto his back, dislodging some of the debris that covered his face and torso. He was handsome in a rugged way, although Serena had been schooled not to give much notice to the face and form of men. This was not the first man she had seen. Once, she had come across a russet-haired youth from the nearby village of Egremont, when she had ventured too near the grove line. The young noble had been in the woods hunting hare; Serena had nearly taken an arrow in her backside as she attempted to escape the stranger's notice. She had learned to be more careful in the time since.
And there could be no comparing the lanky arrogance of the beardless village youth with the hard planes and angles of this man.
Serena came down on her knees in the sand and leaned over his supine body to study this unsettling gift from the sea. A mat of downy hair darkened his chest, but did naught to conceal the slabs of hard muscle beneath. Nestled against his heart lay the golden pendant that had peaked her curiosity. It was a delicate thing, like something her mother would wear. Serena edged closer, wondering if the design might tell her something of the man who wore it, or of the lady for whom it likely had been crafted. She reached out a gloved hand and gingerly lifted the filigree amulet. To her dismay, the tiny links of the chain gave in her loose grasp, breaking away from the man's neck. She caught the memento before it could fall into the sand, and held it tenderly in her gloved palm.
It was made in the shape of a heart, the wiry gold strands woven like a spider's web, and nearly as fragile. Serena brought her free hand to her mouth and used her teeth to strip off her glove. The gold was warm against her fingertips.
The trace heat of the metal jolted her into sudden awareness.
She glanced back at the man, at the fresh blood that yet trickled from his wounds. She frowned, then gasped in startlement as his chest rose with the claiming of a shallow, indrawn breath. At the sound of her surprise, his black lashes lifted, revealing muted hazel eyes. He blinked once, slowly, as though trying to focus.
"Mercy!" she shrieked, leaping to her feet in an instant. She stumbled back on her heels. "You are alive!"
With a groan, he rolled weakly to his side. A ragged, choking sound gathered from his throat as he coughed up a mouthful of seawater.
Serena backed away from him, astonished and filled with mounting, irrational fear.
He was alive.
Absently, she dropped her glove into the
damp sand. Her bare fingertips tingled, clutching the pendant she had retrieved from around his neck.
Never touch, came the dire warning in her mind. Men are wicked and cruel, every last one of them. They can bring you only pain.
"Help--" the man sputtered in a deep, commanding voice. With obvious effort, he lifted his head and met her stricken gaze. "Please...help...me."
He thrust out his arm to grab for her. Serena yelped, then turned and bolted like a terrified doe. She crashed through the bramble, speeding along the winding forest path, heedless of the briars that snagged her skirts and clawed at her bare feet. She ran in breathless panic, fleeing as fast as she could for the haven of the cottage. Her mother would know what to do. She would know how to help him.
"Mother!" Serena called, her voice sharp, pitched to a frantic level. "Mother, where are you? Come quickly!"
Calandra appeared at once, dashing from around the back of the squat cottage. Her hands wrung the modest apron she wore over her dun-colored bliaut, crumbs of dark earth marring the simple weave. Loose tendrils of her silver-streaked, pale blond hair flew out of their confining plait and fell about the oval of her lineless face. Her expression was one of sudden dread and terror, all of it centered on Serena.
"What is it, child? Are you hurt?"
Serena shook her head. "Nay, not I. But there is a man--he's washed up on the beach!"
Calandra rushed forward to clasp Serena's shoulders. Her fingers clenched tight, almost bruising. "Where is your other glove?"
"I don't know. I...I must have dropped it." She winced at the bite of her mother's worried hold. "The man has been injured, Mother. He is bleeding. He begged me to help him."
Some of the color drained from Calandra's already pale cheeks. "He spoke to you? Heaven above, Serena--tell me you did not lay your hands on him!"
"Nay. I would not. You have warned me--"
Calandra's exhaled breath of relief fanned across Serena's brow before she caught her daughter in a fierce embrace. "I have tried to teach you well. All of it was to prepare you for something like this. A stranger, bringing his trouble to our doorstep."
Serena extricated herself from her mother's arms, shaking her head. "He is the one in trouble. He has suffered, Mother, and very nearly drowned. Come, we must help him if we can."
Calandra did not move. Indeed, when Serena pivoted to return to the forest path, her mother caught her by the wrist, halting her before she could take the first step.
"Why do you stand there?" she asked, confused by this queer show of apathy from a woman who had nurtured scores of wounded and sickly animals back to health with less persuasion. Could her fear of men be so deeply rooted that she would not act to aid someone in desperate need of care? "Will you not come with me?"
"I will not," Calandra answered simply. "Nor will I permit you to go to him. You will stay here, and you will put the stranger out of your mind."
Serena stared at her mother as though looking upon a stranger even more foreign than the one now washed ashore on their secluded beach. "But...he is injured, perhaps gravely. He's bleeding and suffering. Do you understand? He is weak, and if we do not help him, he is likely to die there."
Calandra's gaze was steady, uncompromising. "Pray he does, my child."
* * *
Serena lay abed that night, unable to sleep for the nagging sting of her conscience. How could she rest knowing that somewhere, out there in the dark, another human being might be breathing his last--or worse, struggling to live, yet suffocating on the incoming tide as it swept ashore and dragged him helplessly back into the sea? Serena frowned into the dark quiet of the small cottage, tossing off the coverlet as she rose to a sitting position in her bed.
On a pallet across the room, her mother's soft snores rasped the slow rhythm of a deep, untroubled slumber.
It hardly seemed fair.
It certainly did not feel right to her that they should do nothing for the stranger now abandoned on the beach.
She still had his pendant. With tender care, Serena retrieved the necklace from beneath her pallet mattress, where she had secretly stowed it that afternoon, concealing it from her mother's disapproving notice. The small gold links of the chain curled serpentine in her open palm, the delicately wrought pendant winking in the starlight that spilled in through the unshuttered window. She had not meant to take it from him, but in her startlement and her haste to get away, the piece had gone with her.
It felt as wrong as stolen goods in her hand. The pendant did not belong to her, and while she had not taken it intentionally, she could not keep it. She had to bring it back to him, regardless of in what woeful state she might find the man down on the beach.
And she had to admit there was a part of her that wanted to know--needed to know--if there might be some slim chance that she could still help the stranger, regardless of her mother's adamant refusal.
Very carefully, mindful to make not even the slightest noise, Serena withdrew from her pallet bed. Her chemise floated about her feet, ghostly white, as silent as her footsteps on the crude floor of the cottage. Less than ten paces and she reached for the latch on the abode's oiled wood door. The rough-hewn panel gave only the faintest creak of protest as she slipped past it.
Serena paused at the threshold, waiting just long enough to see that the sound of her leaving had not disrupted her mother's sleep. Then, with the pendant caught fast in her hand, she stepped out into the moonlit night and headed for the narrow forest track that would lead her to the shore.
The surf rolled in on whitecapped waves, high tide nearly at its fullest. The water stretched almost halfway up the beach, receding from the sand as a glistening blanket of wetness. Serena looked at once down the line of the shore, walking quickly toward the place she had been that day, but she saw nothing. All that remained was sand and surf.
The debris and seaweed--the injured man--all of it was gone.
As if her unexpected discovery that morning had been naught but a troubling dream.
She stood at the edge of the shoreline, her toes immersed in saltwater and foam as another wave skated up the beach. Guilt welled bitterly in her throat when she thought of the stranger and how she had denied his plea for help. Was he out there somewhere, drifting lifelessly in the black vastness of the ocean beyond?
If so, then she was an accomplice to his death, as responsible as the storm he had barely survived, and the sea that likely claimed him after all. The knowledge squeezed her heart, useless remorse pressing down upon her as she gazed out at the emptiness of the horizon.
"I'm so sorry," she murmured, the pendant chain dangling limp from her fingertips.
Something knocked lightly against her foot as the wave that surged about her ankles now slid back from shore. It was her errant glove, the one she had dropped in her fright. Serena stooped down to pick it up, her ears ringing with the liquid roar of the sea. Waterlogged, likely ruined from its salty bath, the leather glove dripped a steady patter around her feet. She wrung it out, then turned to go back home.
Something tall and shadowed blocked her path.
"What did you do with it, wench?"
Serena tilted her head up...and up some more...until she was staring into a night-dark expression of seething rage.
Animosity radiated like fire from the man she had unwillingly left to die on the beach that morning. Serena took a step back in reflex.
"You stole something from me," the stranger growled, his voice a raw, throaty scrape of sound that skittered along her spine. "Damn it, woman! Tell me what you've done with it."
"H-here," she stammered, holding the pendant out before her in her ungloved fingers. "I didn't mean to take it."
A large hand jutted toward her to grab for the necklace. Serena drew her arm back the instant his fingers closed around the chain, relieved that she could command her wits enough to avoid contact with him. His coarse chuckle held no humor.
"So, you're a petty thief as well." The pendant disappeared in his cu
rled fist. "No more games now. Give me the other item you took while I lay bleeding and unconscious at your feet."
"I-I don't know what you mean. I took nothing else from you, I swear it."
He took a step forward, a menacing step that put him much too close to her. Serena retreated a couple of paces, wading backward into the water. Wet sand sucked at her heels as the tide swelled with the incoming rush of another wave, the dark water catching the hem of her long chemise. The fabric twisted about her ankles, nearly tripping her.
"What did you take from this satchel?" he demanded, flinging an empty leather bag at her.
Serena caught it in her arms, confusion swamping her as quickly as the coming tide. "I took nothing out of this. You had the bag when I found you today, but I know naught of what it contained. For all I know, it was empty even at that time."
"Lies!" he bellowed.
His fists were held rigidly at his sides, and in the scant light of the partial moon and scattered stars, something wild flared in his eyes.
It was all the warning she had. In a flash of movement, the stranger lunged for her. Serena cried out, narrowly escaping his swinging grasp. She threw the satchel at his face, hearing the wet leather slap his skin as she pivoted on her heel and dodged his long reach.
All of Calandra's warnings came back to her now, a thousand cautions about the brutal, unfeeling nature of men. What a fool she had been to doubt her mother, even for a moment.
Serena ran out of the water and up onto the beach, but the man was right behind her. His steps were weak, faltering from his exhaustion and the lack of traction in the sand. But still he gained on her, each long-legged stride outpacing two of hers. Suddenly he was on her. A firm, heavy hand landed on her shoulder, throwing her off balance. He spun her around to face him, teeth bared bright white in the darkness, his breath hissing out from between his clenched jaw.