Heir of Danger

by Alix Rickloff

  She hated the unbidden skip of her heart. As if somehow miraculously after all this time word would come that Brendan had returned.

  Tearing open the wax seal, she scanned the page. “It’s from Cat,” she said, though she’d a strong feeling her aunts already knew that. Had probably set it up in a flash of inspiration. She could hear them now: We’ll force her out of her shell like prying open a crab.

  Well, she liked her shell, thank you very much.

  “Cat’s asked us to join them at Christmas. Sabrina and Daigh MacLir will be there with their daughter, and Jack O’Gara’s been invited. Even Miss Roseingrave and her grandmother are expected.”

  “Oh, it sounds absolutely delightful. Nothing like a houseful of family to make a holiday sparkle,” chattered Aunt Pheeney, grinning like a Cheshire cat. “And having little ones about makes it even better. Isn’t it Lord Kilronan’s boy’s first Christmas? I saw His Lordship just the other day. He looked proud as a peacock.”

  Elisabeth felt the lump in her throat drop into her stomach. A child. Brendan’s child. She would have liked that, but as with so much else, it had not been fated. She’d not even been allowed that much of him.

  She chided herself for her weakness. Her maudlin droopiness. It had been long enough. She needed to move on. To stop hoping. To forget. Just as Brendan had.

  “We’ll begin to lay out your clothes this afternoon. Perhaps a trip to Ennis next week.” Aunt Pheeney’s cheerfulness was almost painful. “You know what Bacon says: ‘Riches are for spending,’ and I saw the loveliest velvet in Nicholas blue the last time I was there. And there was a fabulous picture of a morning robe in the latest Ackermann’s. Let me see if I can find it.”

  She began rummaging through a stack of magazines and papers beside her chair, looking so pleased Elisabeth couldn’t bear to disappoint her. And why not order a new gown? It would go with her new resolve. She would lock away her time with Brendan as a glistening, beautiful memory to last her a lifetime.

  “There’s a letter from your uncle in London as well,” Aunt Fitz said, her gaze narrowing. “He writes to say Gordon Shaw was married last month.”

  Elisabeth frowned. It had been six months since Gordon had arrived at Dun Eyre, looking as smug as ever as he asked her to reconsider a marriage between them. Six months since she’d sent him away, wondering if she was giving up her last chance at a husband and a family of her own.

  “I’m happy for him,” she said as Aunt Fitz continued to regard her steadily. “I am. We would have made a horrible hash of things had we wed.” She rose, dragging her shawl close around her shoulders. “Excuse me.” Chin up, she forced herself to walk sedately from the salon. “I’ve just forgotten something in my room.”

  Twin pairs of worried gazes bored into her back. The buzz of whispers trailing behind her. “Told you not to throw that at her . . . a shock.”

  “Needed to know . . . not coming back . . . over . . .”

  Once out of range of her aunts’ custody, Elisabeth dashed up the stairs, through the upper corridor, to the long gallery, where she sank onto a sofa, her breath coming in short, heaving gasps as she fought back foolish tears.

  How long she remained there before her aunt found her, she couldn’t say. One minute she was alone with the portraits for company, the next Aunt Fitz was beside her, an arm around her shoulders, a hand smoothing her hair as she’d done when Elisabeth was a child.

  “I don’t know why I’m crying. Had we married, Gordon would soon have been miserable and I—”

  “Would have found yourself married to a man you did not love. Young Lochinvar still holds a tight grip upon your heart.”

  “I’ve tried so many times, Aunt Fitz. I tell myself every morning: I shall make this the day I finally stop believing he’s going to come back. Then I dream of him, and it’s so vivid it’s as if he were in the room with me. I see that his hair needs trimming and he’s thinner. I see a scar upon his cheek that wasn’t there before. He takes my hand, but he never speaks. And when I wake, I can smell his scent on my pillow and feel the heat of him in the bed beside me. I know he’s not returning. It’s been too long and my hope is gone, but I’m afraid if I make myself forget, he’ll stop coming to me. I won’t even have my dreams.”

  They sat in silence, each lost in her own thoughts. Elisabeth felt herself relax in her aunt’s quiet embrace, her muscles slowly unwinding, her breathing slowing to normal.

  Aunt Fitz gathered Elisabeth’s hands in her own. Her gaze lifting to the portrait of her parents. “You remind me of your grandmother.”

  Elisabeth wiped her face, sitting up to gaze at the woman in the portrait’s dreamy features, her wistful smile soft as a spring rain. No one had ever compared Elisabeth to her before. Her grandmother had been tiny, wispy, faded, and quiet. Everything Elisabeth was not.

  “She too retreated into dreams when she lost the one most dear to her,” Aunt Fitz explained.

  “Grandfather?”

  “You never knew him, he died long before you were born, but the two of them loved deeply. Perhaps too deeply, for his death seemed to kill a part of her. From that time on, she was never the same vibrant, beautiful woman we had known. She became as much a wraith as any spirit.”

  “Brendan once called him a prune.” Elisabeth brushed away a tear.

  Aunt Fitz laughed. “He could be, but he also loved his wife beyond reason. It’s rare to find that kind of bond. And almost impossible to set aside. But no matter how hard you try, you cannot follow where Brendan’s gone anymore than my mother could follow my father. And there is a risk in living only in dreams.”

  “So you’re saying I should wake up now?”

  Firmness in her gold-flecked eyes, Aunt Fitz nodded. “It is time.”

  He stood upon a hill above Belfoyle, his hand upon the ward stone, its power pouring through him in pulses of coruscating light.

  Breán Duabn’thach, it whispered in the tongue of the ancients, accepting him as its own, though he’d the feeling it had hesitated, as if unable to comprehend this strange mixture of man and Fey that he’d become.

  From this ridge Brendan could look down upon his home, seeing it laid out before him like blocks upon a child’s quilt. The folds of the hills, a stream becoming a river as it moved inland, cabins and houses connected by lanes and tracks and roads bordered by a low stone wall, the walls of the house, its towers rising above the trees, and beyond it, the sea moving slick and gray in the distance, the sound of the surf amplified by the low, dirty clouds scudding overhead.

  Closing his eyes, he inhaled the cold, damp air, feeling it in every freshly healed bone. Flakes drifted frozen across his cheeks, clung to his eyelashes. He opened his eyes to see snow falling softly over the meadows and fields, bleaching the world to gunmetal gray.

  All but for a lone rider. The horse’s glossy chestnut coat drawing his eye. The rider’s blaze of red hair clamping a fist around his heart. A vision and a name he’d clung to when all else had grown ragged and faded in his mind. A woman he’d traveled between worlds to find again.

  Elisabeth.

  He’d finally come home.

  Snow swirled in the wind, drifting out across the gray waters of the sea. Gulls floated on the updrafts, while others dove into the chop. Surfacing to swallow their dinner. Elisabeth lifted her face to the cold, letting the sting of ice burn her cheeks. Inhaling the crisp bite of winter wind. Her horse sidled with impatience, but Elisabeth held the long-legged chestnut mare still as she scanned the horizon, a ship’s sails bright white against the cloudy sky.

  She’d ridden out alone, the laughter and noise and constant need to play a part finally wearing her down. She needed space to breathe. To be alone with her thoughts and last night’s dream.

  It had been as real as life. Brendan looking over his shoulder as he stepped from a circle of weathered stones. Swinging up on a rangy, flea-bitten gray with a wild eye and chopping gait. His gaze lifted, and it was as if he looked straight at her. Over time. Ove
r distance. And she’d jerked awake, heart crashing, blood pushing through a restless body. Somehow she knew this would be the last such dream. He would not come to her again. She would lose even that small comfort.

  The snow intensified, the tiny, drifting flakes becoming a curtain of white, the ground disappearing beneath a feathery blanket. Her horse pawed the ground, its breath clouding the air. Perhaps she should return to Belfoyle’s warmth and company. Let Sabrina’s daughter crawl into her lap for a story. Smell the sweet baby scent of Aidan’s new son. Wrap herself in the love of family, old and new.

  She reined the chestnut in a circle, headed back toward the warmth of the Belfoyle stables. The horse dropped into a slow, surefooted canter, the cliffs sliding past them on their right, the sea a foaming, white-capped silver froth rimed in black at the far edge of the world. The wind and the snow mixed with her tears to blur the track before her, but instead of slowing, she gave the chestnut its head, the lengthening pound of its stride matching her heart beat for beat. Her hat flew off. Her hair fell free from its pins in the tear of wind and snow.

  And then there was another. A rider pushed his way through the storm toward her.

  She dashed the tears from her eyes as she leaned over her mare’s withers, refusing to allow an intruder into her solitude. And then refusing to lose the unspoken challenge as the horse swept down on them.

  The ground flew beneath her, the mare giving and then giving again, but still the newcomer inched his way closer, eating the distance between them. Elisabeth steered for the far hedgerow, but he was on her, the horse’s nose pulling even, then just ahead. The rider turned his face toward her, and his eyes glowed bright as suns.

  She couldn’t breathe. Her heart stopped. She heard nothing but the sound of the wind. Saw only a swirl of storm clouds. Felt nothing beyond the slowing of her mare as the man leaned over to take a rein, bringing both horses down to a trot, then a walk, pulling them up as she slithered from the saddle and into his arms.

  His lips warm upon hers. His embrace like steel bands pressing her close, his voice a lilting purr in her ears. “No tears. No tears, my love.”

  “Are you real or a dream?” she whispered, unable to believe. After all, how often did one’s wishes come true?

  Brendan took her by the shoulders, pushing her to arm’s length, and she got her first good look at him. There was the scar on his left cheek. The unfashionably long hair brushing his shoulders, the leanness of his once muscled frame.

  “Not a dream, Lissa,” he answered. “Not this time.”

  Her eyes widened. “You sent them. It was you all along.”

  “It was the only way I knew to keep you from forgetting until I could find a way back to you.”

  As she drank him in, other changes sharpened into focus. A new sculpted beauty to his fallen-angel features as if he’d been riven in sharper lines, deeper colors, all earthly softness cut away, leaving only the forged steel of his Fey heritage. The very air seemed charged with his presence.

  She frowned. “You’re not the same. I don’t mean the clothes or the hair, but something else. You don’t feel the same.” She placed a hand over his heart. “In here.”

  His fingers laced with hers. The bones broken and bent, they curled into his palm. The flesh stretched and silver with scars.

  Her eyes swam with tears. She couldn’t seem to stop their flow now that she’d begun. As if a year and a half of grieving had been loosed. She wanted to tell him everything, all that had occurred in the past year and a half, but managed only a sobbing, “Your hand.”

  His smile held self-consciousness and a small tinge of embarrassment. “The Fey kept me alive, but even their healing has limits. And that came at a price. I’m not sure if I’m exactly who I was before. I feel less human. Less solid. And yet, not of their world either. Like I’m standing between. A foot on each side of the divide.”

  “Like Arthur.”

  His brows rose, his lips curled in a crooked smile. “That’s a comparison that could go to a fellow’s head.”

  She stood on tiptoe, tasting the cool firmness of his lips. Snow slid over the carved lines of his face. Melted upon his collar. “They warned me you would forget. That, once within the summer kingdom, there was no coming back.”

  “Not so long ago, to forget my past would have been my greatest desire. But they say be careful what you wish for. Losing those memories meant losing you. I couldn’t do it. I loved you too much to give you up without a fight.”

  His gaze slid into the cold ice of her heart until she ached with the pain of its thawing. As if she could finally breathe without the stab of his loss. “But how?”

  “I had this.” He pulled free a gold chain, the rainbow sparkle of her opal catching fire in the gray light.

  She laughed through her tears. “You said it was just a stone. Nothing magic about it.”

  “It was given in love, and that’s a magic not even the Fey truly understand.”

  She burrowed against him, hearing the steady rhythm of his heart, the slow rise and fall of his chest, his hand running up and down her back, and she shook with horrid, wretched weeping.

  “Ah, my sweet. Don’t cry. It’s over. I’ll not leave you again. I’m home. For good. I promise.”

  “Is that a promise you’ll keep or one you’ll break?” she sniffled.

  “All this way and that’s all the welcome I get? I can leave again if you like.”

  He tried to walk away, but she grabbed hold of him. “No!” Looked up to see the teasing laughter in his eyes. “You’re a right bastard, Brendan Douglas.” She wiped away her tears with the back of her hand.

  He put an arm around her, wrapping her close as she reached out to touch his hair, his face, his chest. Reassuring herself he was real.

  He tipped her chin up with his bent and crooked fingers, his smile breaking her heart all over again. “Aye, Mrs. Douglas, but you love me anyway.”

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