by Hazel Hunter
Rage burned inside Oriana. She should have brought one of Hendry’s stone axes with her so she might chop the idiot famhair into kindling. She should have guessed that the two trapped souls had caused the tribe’s totems to evolve…
Suddenly she saw the other side of it, one that would serve justice to all the giants.
This was how she would end all of Hendry’s creatures, just as soon as they slaughtered the Skaraven for her. She simply had to untether the other souls trapped inside them, and they would revert back to what they had been, just as Tri had done.
She limped over to the oak, eyeing the deep scar high on the trunk, and the two knot holes on either side.
“You’ve given me much aid this day, my lad.”
Chapter Thirteen
AT THE END of Rowan’s first day at the Wood Dream settlement Hendry and Aon came into the barn. The giant stood well back from the two buckets of water that the druid carried and set down by the wall.
“Fair evening, Sister.” Hendry’s gaze wandered over her with visible greed. “I’m told you’ve accomplished much work.”
So, he was having her watched, Rowan thought, and why did he keep looking at her like that?
“What did you think I was going to do? Ask a giant to braid my hair? Get your girlfriend to rub my feet? I said I’d help you, not work on my tan.”
“So you did.” He nodded at the table. “Show us what you’ve done.”
She used the massive arm she’d been shaping to demonstrate how she’d modified the wooden limbs. Manipulating the upper and lower sections, she used a range of positions to pivot and move the arm almost as naturally as her own.
“Once they’re attached to the torsos, I’ll expand the joint connectors to keep them locked in place, like this.” Rowan drew a simple diagram of what she meant in the fine wood dust on the table, hoping that would distract Hendry from looking too closely at her work. “Should be no problem keeping them light on their feet and swinging powerhouse punches.”
That would be true, at least at first. In actual battle the staggered flaws she’d deliberately placed in every leg and arm joint would gradually give way. One after another they would snap like falling dominos, until the new giants collapsed. One decent rumble with the Skaraven would turn the whole bunch into a pile of cracked, useless wood.
“You’ve done well.” The druid glanced at Taran, who stood at one end of the table watching them. “What of him?”
“So far he’s been a good grunt. Helps that he can’t run his yap.” Rowan didn’t want to sound too happy. “I just wish I had a few dozen horse stalls for him to muck out—with his hands.”
Hendry uttered a sour chuckle. “’Tis plain you’ve my blood in your veins.” He gestured at Aon, who tossed a bulging sack on the table. “Some food for your evening meal. Of course, you’ll spend the night here to assure your slave doesnae escape.”
“Happy to.”
Rowan had already guessed that someone else had slept in the barn when she’d spotted the clothes and blankets. Hendry wasn’t going to trust having her in the cottage. Aon lingered for a moment after Hendry left, giving her a long, ugly look before he walked out and bolted the door shut from the outside.
“Looks like me and Granddad still have some trust issues.”
She rinsed off her hands before she opened the sack, which contained oatcakes, a wedge of cheese, dried apples and a flask of what smelled like cider. She divided up the food, giving Taran the bigger share, and felt him flinch as she reached out to touch him.
“Just eat,” Rowan suggested, gathering up her portion and retreating to the back corner of the barn. As she ate she peeked through a gap in the timbers to see two famhairean standing guard. Once she finished she returned to the front of the barn, and peered through a knothole to see Aon’s back only inches away.
She’d been hoping to slip out with Taran during the night and make a run for the loch. Once they reached water the giants wouldn’t come near them. That would have to wait until tomorrow. Nor could she tell Taran she’d played along with Ochd in order to save him and sabotage the totems. She wouldn’t risk Aon or one of the others overhearing her. She also wasn’t sure he’d believe her.
All day he’d done whatever she’d told him to. But he’d watched her with contempt and disbelief in his eyes, as if she’d turned into a famhair.
Rowan eyed the chains by the stake. If she bound Taran to it again he’d probably find a way to free himself while she slept. She could order him to stay inside the barn, and not to strangle her in her sleep. Still, he’d think of a way to get around whatever she demanded of him via her touch compulsion.
Already the temperature was dropping fast. To keep warm they’d have to share body heat. She knew only one way to do that safely, and it would make him hate her even more.
From the pile of unused wood Rowan dragged four heavy logs into the shape of a large rectangle around the mound of hay. Using her power, she formed them into a bedframe and spread one of the blankets to cover the hay. Finally, she made two holes in the topmost log, and retrieved his shackles. Night crept over the barn as Rowan steeled herself to finish her task. At least in the dark he wouldn’t see how guilty she felt.
“Come over here, slave.” She said it loud enough for the giants to hear. When Taran joined her, she pointed to the makeshift bed. “Stretch out on there with your hands over your head.”
His aquamarine eyes turned glacial as he saw what she meant to do, and his body jerked a few times as he tried to fight the order. Her mojo won again, however, and he dropped onto the blanket, rolled onto his back and lifted his arms up.
Straddling him felt horrible and glorious. She felt the same ferocious desire that always came over her the moment their bodies touched. He grew instantly hard under her, and she went wet in response, as if nothing else mattered.
But for the first time it shamed her.
Even like this we want each other.
Instead of endless love it was beginning to feel like a curse. She wanted to tell him how sorry she was, and that she’d rather chain herself down than do this to him. But for now, at least, keeping him alive was more important than what he thought of her.
When they got away she’d tell him everything.
Feeling exhausted now, Rowan ran the chain through the holes in the wood, wrapping the lengths around the log several times. She then shackled his wrists to the chain effectively restraining him. Once she climbed off him she lay down at his side and drew the blanket up over them both.
Turning on her side away from him, Rowan closed her eyes and, not for the first time in her life, wished she were dead.
Of all the ways Taran had imagined being with Rowan, as a slave chained to her bed had never once occurred to him.
The position brought back memories from his mortal life, although Taran had never desired the pleasure lasses brought to ritually service the Skaraven. Unlike his brothers he felt no excitement over the prospect of facking, and rarely found relief with even the comeliest of the females.
The druids knew him to be different as well. A trainer once took him alone to a broch, where waited a handsome shepherd who looked at him with naked yearning. Taran remembered feeling vaguely amused by the lad’s earnest efforts to arouse him, but in the end he had proved incapable with another man.
“’Tis rare for a Pritani no’ to feel desires of the flesh,” the trainer told him after sending away the disappointed shepherd. “Likely the Gods fashioned you thus for some solitary path or purpose. We shallnae compel you again if ’tis no’ your wont.”
Relieved to be released from the tiresome chore, Taran had agreed. Yet he knew the druid to be wrong about his nature. He’d never felt a desire to be alone. Indeed, since boyhood he’d felt bereft, as if torn asunder and left with only half of himself. As his battle spirit was half-man, half-horse, he’d attributed the strange sense of loss to serving the centaur.
Only when Rowan had come to Dun Mor had the lonely feeling va
nished.
Beside him hay crackled as the druidess’s weight shifted, and a smooth arm slid across his waist. He could just make out her features, which looked calm and peaceful. She’d curled up against him, her strong body warming his, as if they’d always slept together like this.
His arms ached, but not from being chained. Taran wanted to pull her closer, and hold her so he could feel the whole length of her against him.
This, when she’d betrayed and silenced him, enslaved and chained him. He’d likely die on his knees before her, still gazing at her in rapt fascination as Ochd took his head.
So be it.
Taran shifted to pillow her head with his shoulder, and felt the dampness of her cheek. She’d been weeping? The whole side of her face felt wet with tears. It made as much sense as her falling asleep beside him when he could smell her arousal. If she despised him as much as she had claimed to Hendry, then why hadn’t she made use of his body? She’d felt his erection. He wouldn’t have been able to stop her.
He closed his eyes, muddled and angry and unable to fathom any of it.
The weight and warmth of her against him felt so good he only wished to savor that. His eyelids drooped as he wished he’d done this in the hayloft back at Dun Mor. So many nights together with those hay bales between them, when he might have had her so close.
A ring of pit fires flared up around Taran, the flames crackling with snapping embers as they danced against the darkness. He could smell salt on the air, and heard waves crashing in the distance. Tendrils of heat drawn by the light wind brushed against his bare scalp and neck. He knew he stood in a sacred place, for unseen power danced all around him.
Moonlight illuminated immense stones stacked to form an enormous ring of arches. He knelt before two massive crystals in the center, and carefully placed a wreath of gold wrought to resemble mistletoe between them. He felt a kinship to the black crystal, but the white beside it stirred his blood.
Strange skinwork covered his strong hands in dark blue and black glyphs. A cuff of intricately-worked bronze encircled his wrist. He touched his brow to the earth before he stood and shrugged away his fur cloak. Glancing down, he saw he now stood much taller, and had acquired muscles sculpted with brutal perfection.
“Gratitude for the bounty you provide, Lord and Lady,” he said, the words spilling from his lips in a language he’d never before heard and yet clearly understood. “Permit us serve you ever as your devoted ones.”
Taran turned to see hundreds of solemn faces watching him. The men and women, most young, wore garments of dark fur and blackened hide over their slender bodies. All had been inked with variations of the glyphs on his hands, and several wore living crowns of mistletoe. One of the eldest stepped forward and lifted a large seashell to his lips, blowing through one end to make a deep, pervasive sound.
The people moved apart as a majestic female clad in white furs approached him, followed by a procession of her people. Dressed in bleached hides trimmed with pale furs, they looked markedly different from his own dark tribe.
Their leader might have been a goddess made flesh. Tiny gilded shells and cream-colored pearls gleamed in the coils of her gold-dusted auburn braids. She wore a heavy torque of etched bronze around her graceful neck. Her tall, powerful body matched his own in its robustness and beauty, and glyphs covered her strong hands. With each step she took, Taran’s heart beat faster, for he felt the power of her presence like a physical caress. When she halted an arm’s length away from him, he looked into her golden eyes and saw Rowan.
“My lady Ruadhan,” he said as he bowed deeply to her.
She dipped low in return. “My lord Tairne.”
Power flared dark blue as it illumed their skinwork, drawing them closer. Their desire for each other spread throughout the two tribes. The people watching them began to retreat to the stone arches, forming pairs of dark and light.
“Our tribes entwine before the Gods,” Taran said and stepped closer. He brought her glowing hand to his bare chest. Once every year Ruadhan came to him, to this place, to join with him in a sensual ritual to insure fertility for both their tribes. He lived for this night, but it had never been enough for him. “Mate with me, Rua, and we need never again part.”
“’Twould make you the most powerful leader among dru-wid kind. I would be made but a wife.” Her full lips curved. “As much as you please me, Tai, I think no’.”
Like her magnificent body, her pride matched his own. He had known her since they’d shared their first pleasures together, and watched her mature into a formidable leader. Many men had sought her hand since she had taken her mother’s place as the head of her tribe, but she had refused them all. To win her he would have to offer her something she already possessed: his heart.
“You’d rule both tribes at my side, as my equal,” Taran said. “We need but mate as the Gods made flesh.”
She went still, her lips parting with surprise. “You’d fate yourself to me?”
“I’ve no’ touched another in my life, Rua. I ken you’ve done the same.” As the couples in the arches began to embrace, he drew Ruadhan down to kneel with him in the cool grass. “Choose to be my Lady, and I shall be your Lord.”
She said nothing more, and Taran reined in his impatience as he disrobed her. Stroking her ripe breasts made his stiff cock swell until it throbbed. He kissed the elegant curves of her shoulders, and pressed his hot face between her mounds, relishing the silken warmth and delicious scent of her.
“’Twould be for eternity,” she warned him, her voice fiery with fierce emotion as she drew him down to lay with her in the grass. “In this and every other life.”
Taran joined their bodies, and touched his mouth to her brow before he looked into her eyes. “Perhaps ’twill be long enough for me to love you as I wish.”
Chapter Fourteen
HEARING TARAN SAY he wanted to love her forever jerked Rowan awake. She tried to go back, unwilling to relinquish the feel of having him inside her at last. That joining had obliterated the nagging emptiness she’d endured all her life. But the weight of the wool blanket and her garments dragged at her, making it impossible to fall asleep again.
A familiar frustration knotted in her chest.
Can’t I even have him in my damn dreams?
She opened her eyes and froze as she looked at his sleeping face, not an inch away from her own. During the night she’d curled up against him and tucked her head on his shoulder. She never wanted to move again, but if Hendry saw them like this he’d kill the horse master for sure—or do worse and not kill him.
The moment she moved Taran woke, and he looked at her as if she were his entire universe again. That lasted for as long as it took for him to move his arms and realize he was still chained to the bed.
“You have a nice skull, but I didn’t like you bald,” Rowan said as she pushed herself away from him. She caught the way he stared at her as she stood and released his shackles from the chains. “You had the same dream, didn’t you? Answer me.”
As if he couldn’t stand the sight of her Taran averted his face. “Aye.”
Rowan went to look through the cracks and saw that Aon had gone. After checking the back and spotting no more guards outside she hurried back to him.
“Listen to me. It’s not what you’re thinking. I’m trying to–”
The sound of the bolt being raised on the door made her shut her mouth and turn. The teenage version of Murdina came in and surveyed them both.
“A Skaraven as your servant. You never fail to shock me, Sister.”
“Gee, thanks for the lukewarm welcome.” Just hearing the mad woman’s voice made Rowan’s back burn from the memory of the whipping. “We have work to do for Hendry, so you and I will have to catch up later. Stop by again in six or seven hundred years.”
Murdina shook a finger from side to side. “’Twas Hendry sent me to fetch you. Chain up that animal, and we’ll go for a stroll.” When Rowan didn’t move her smile faded. “Or
I may summon Dha to smash your pet into the dirt and drag you out by your hair.”
“You’re just as charming and considerate as ever.” Rowan led Taran to the stake, and transferred the chains from the bed to lock him to it. “Don’t try to escape.”
His gaze shifted to Murdina for a moment, and then he gave Rowan a hard look.
That Taran didn’t want her to leave with the nutcase was plain. Still, to keep up appearances she’d have to act as if the druidess was her new best pal.
“Rest while you can,” she told him. “I shouldn’t be long.” She hoped. No, she prayed.
Following Murdina out of the barn, Rowan felt the still, stale cold pressing all around her like the flesh of a corpse. She saw Hendry and most of the giants working on something at the edge of the settlement. The druidess skipped in the opposite direction, however, so she had to trudge after her through the woods.
When they reached the clearing where Hendry kept the totems, Murdina snaked her arm through Rowan’s and giggled at her flinch.
“You ken I shallnae harm you,” the druidess scolded. “I’m to teach you the spell you must use to finish the tribe’s solstice ritual.”
“Isn’t it a little early for this?” She didn’t resist as Murdina tugged her to the center of the clearing. “We haven’t finished assembling all the totems yet, and that was the first thing on your boyfriend’s to-do list.”
“You’ll no’ cast the spell until we rebuild the altar here.” The druidess gestured at a small group of shallow depressions in the ground. “Even so ’twill no’ work unless you spill blood first. Or last.” She thought for a moment. “Last. Blood seals the spell.”
Rowan’s stomach clenched. “I have to cut myself?”
Murdina giggled. “No, you goose. You’ll sacrifice another to the Gods. Human death releases much power, which you’ll use to finish the spell.”