by Blake, Laila
He was about to walk on when he stopped again and changed his mind. She didn’t always answer to knocks and often these days, her door was locked, but he was her father. Nothing so simple should stop him from seeing her, if just for a few minutes. It wasn’t the first time, nor would it be the last that he was worried about her, but Deagan Fairester’s prolonged presence in the Keep did constitute a special circumstance. He was her father, he reminded himself, a lord of his domain. He could weather a young woman’s sadness this day or any day.
The lyre stopped sounding its melody when he knocked on the door. A few moments of silence followed.
“Moira, darling, may I come in?” Lord Rochmond asked, clearing his throat loudly from the obstruction that had made it difficult to get out those last few words.
The silence lasted and already Lord Rochmond didn’t know if he would try the handle. Was it possible to both love and fear your child? He had pondered this many times when her strangeness took hold of her stronger and stronger with each passing season into womanhood. Was it possible that the same tender feelings that made her want to pull her to his chest like he had when she was a girl, also made him want to stay away and not witness what she was becoming? How much she was hurting or what others had to see in her?
Lord Rochmond shook his head at himself and turned his head to walk away when a small sound made him turn back. The door handle was squeaking softly and it slowly turned. When the door opened and her freckled and tired face came into view, he felt guilty for the paths his thoughts had taken and he gave her a warm smile.
“You still play so beautifully, darling,” he complimented gently, drawing a little smile to her lips. Not her eyes, but her lips. It was a start. “I haven’t gotten to listen to it lately, have I?”
“I wouldn’t want to impose on your time,” Moira answered quietly and opened the door a little further. “I … I know you have many things on your mind. I … I can see it.” Looking down, she stepped away from the door, hugging herself a little bit.
“Not so many that I wouldn’t like some time with my only daughter,” Lord Rochmond answered, following her inside. The door stayed open, whether as an escape route for him or a sense of security for her, he didn’t know. “Are you quite all right? I know this isn’t easy for you.”
Swallowing hard, Moira shrugged. Her mind was still filled with the secret kiss on the battlements, her entire body still vibrating with longing for another one. And yet, she was avoiding Owain and he her. She had made herself stay inside night after night even on those where she had desperately yearned for some time to breathe, some time on the open air that would offer relief from worrying about her future as Deagan’s wife. The very idea repulsed her to her core, made her feel powerless and without hope. But there she was, thinking about Owain’s hands and his lips when her father was smiling encouragingly.
“I know you have been trying, sweetheart. I want you to know that I see it, that you have been making an effort with him. I wanted to thank you for that.”
“Thank you, Father.” It wasn’t an easy sentiment to cross her lips but she got it past them anyway, attempting a mild smile before she gestured to a small sofa and a seat he could take if he so wished. When he moved toward it, she followed him, a little tremulous and sat down, very conscious of every movement to adhere to the grace of his house. As rebellious as she seemed a lot of the time, the idea of disappointing her father did weigh heavily on her.
“And should I ask?” he continued, a rather kind smile on his face that warmed her a little, even if she knew the answer he wanted would be hard to give. “Do you think you might like him a little bit?”
“Deagan?” she asked, if just to buy time and she tried to smile. It turned out rather doubting and scared and she knew it. “He seems perfectly … kind.” She stumbled through, cleared her throat and then shrugged helplessly. “Really, Father, I … I would be honored to marry any man you deemed fit to rule your fief, whether that be Deagan Fairester or any other. I hardly think … ” she shook her head, voice failing her again. Her face was flushed and she sucked in a vaguely panicked breath.
Suddenly, though, her father reached out a hand and placed it on her knee. His other one found her cheek and for a moment, he was just her father again. Not the high lord of an important fief, not a political leader or a man worried about his legacy. He was just her father, and his rough thumb brushed over her cheekbone.
“If that was my wish, my darling, we would have done that long ago. I want you to be happy. I want to see you smile.”
A moment of sadness overwhelmed them both and finally, he drew his hand away, shaking his head.
“I think that Deagan is an adequate candidate. He seems a little supercilious but he is young. Wisdom and modesty come with age. If you like him, if you can imagine liking him at all — I would be glad to give him my blessing, dear.”
Moira nodded. She wanted to cry but she managed not to. Owain would never have his blessing, she knew that. So if it couldn’t be him, did it really matter at all who she chose? Maybe it would be easier to get it over with fast. Maybe.
“Why don’t you join us at the hunt tomorrow, dear?” her father continued. Like all members of their family he was well aware that you could not always expect an answer from Moira when her face sunk into that thoughtful expression. “Deagan expressed that he would like to have you there. And it would certainly brighten my day.”
A hunt. It wasn’t exactly Moira’s idea of a pleasant afternoon. But he was her father and he looked sweet and happy and she loved him. Sometimes matters were more simple than she ever would have liked. If her father asked, she had to at least try. She always had.
• • •
The forest was full of the sound of horses and dogs, rearing, whinnying, barking and growling. There was the harsh sound of exploding gunpowder from time to time and more often the snap and swish of a firing crossbow. It was a pandemonium of movement, deliberate in each individual but erratic in the mass of bodies, running, watching, firing and shouting commands.
The trees in the quiet foothills of the western mountains hadn’t seen such a spectacle of blood and noise in many years and yet, all they did was stand silent watch over the proceedings, stray bolts deep in their bark. Every wild creature for miles around was hiding deep in the earth or their nests; those who couldn’t were running for their lives. And yet they fell, a bird in colorful plumage here, a hare there, small spoils, practice shots, hardly regarded a kill at all.
The group of hunters was divided into those mounted on sturdy steeds and those who hurried through the underbrush on their own feet, steadier with their weapons and always after their dogs. Deagan Fairester had brought his own horse all the way up the river Vime but most of his company were riding Lord Rochmond’s horses, healthy, rested animals who didn’t see too much hunting. They were skittish around the smell of blood but the experienced hunters in Sir Fairester’s company knew their way around that with whip and spurs. The rest of the men were running beside them, hardly daring to show exhaustion on the hunting party’s frequent halts. The only one who did not have to pretend was Owain; to him, the pace was leisurely, hardly biting enough to test his stamina.
Owain stayed out of the thick of it, however, both by choice and by necessity. Too close proximity to his predatory scent and atmosphere would make the already skittish horses all the more panicky. As it was, he felt more at ease around the dogs anyway. They were a pathetic and tamed version of his ancestral wolf, but their smell was still familiar in a way and they reacted far more easily to his subtle commands than they did to the shouting dog keepers. Humans had strange ways of doing things; it would never quite stop to catch his bemused attention.
Owain preferred his own hunting bow to the human crossbows that seemed a little small and clumsy in his hands. Blaidyn had blacksmiths who created perfect crossbows for their own people, fas
hioned specifically to the arm length of each hunter but Owain had not owned one for a long time. His bow was simple and he had carved and fashioned it himself, always having felt more close to the working of wood than that of metal.
Like all able-bodied men, he had been invited out, and of course Lord Rochmond expected his presence wherever his daughter went. Moira was sitting quite daintily in a side-saddle that, to Owain, looked utterly wrong under her; pushing her body into a stance that fit the fine gown and the tight hairdo of braids and pearls but not her face or her haunted eyes, not her heart.
It had generally been deemed healthy for her to join the hunt, with her enjoyment of nature and Deagan’s desire to spend some time with her. He was a tried and tested hunter, found the sport relaxing and friendly, an opportunity to test himself gamely against other men, his speed, his cunning, his hearing and aim. All of these were attributes he was keen to prove, both to his potential father-in-law and the reluctant bride.
The difference in their demeanor as it presented itself to Owain couldn’t be vaster. Fairester was smiling, at times even barking out a hearty laugh when one of his men stumbled over a root. He cheered when bolt or bullet found a target, clapped his friends’ shoulders and reached the flagon of wine around. He was in his element and from his ease in the party, Owain could extrapolate the way he lived in the capital, his habits and day-to-day activities to seek enjoyment and distraction. As hard as he tried, though, he couldn’t see Moira there, at the loud feasts where wine flowed aplenty and laughter roared across the tables.
He had been trying not to watch her for two long days, trying to redirect his senses away from their constant focus on every sound she made, the gentle tap of her footfall, the low timbre of her voice, the intoxicating array of smells she created just by walking past him. It wasn’t possible. In fact, he was more aware of her than ever, saw each of her diverted glances, every spike in heart rate or body heat. They were trying to ignore each other as best as they could, lying by omission as though a yearning with averted eyes wasn’t a yearning still.
She had stayed in her chambers, made sure not to be alone with him in dark corners and he had stayed away. It was simple enough, in a way; feelings like theirs were not unheard of but in a life of a noble woman such as herself, they simply didn’t factor into her life or the path it was laid out to take. A secret kiss, hidden in a corner in the middle of the night had little consequence, nor did the fact that she was going to get married to a man she did not have those tender little feelings for. What were they at the end of the day? Nothing at all. They were just a blossom, blooming after a shower of rain, too small and too fragile to trust and without any chance to stand the test of time.
And yet, there she was on a beautiful mare not too far from him and he couldn’t help his eyes straying. It was all the more difficult because she was miserable and the tension of her muscles, the slight shivering and the erratic way her eyes moved were giving him cause to worry. It was almost second nature to him already to gauge her state of mind. He had come to expect her trying to seek solitude outside when during the day, she had started to behave in certain ways, shivering and tense. There was that sense to her in those moments that every movement of her body was aimed at hiding, at making herself smaller and a more difficult target and each motion that went against this looked terribly arduous. She was in a similar state now. Movement restricted by the odd saddle, she looked like a caged animal, a wild thing forced into an invisible cage. To most people she would look free and privileged, but that only seemed to cement her prison.
Owain was so finely tuned to her movements and the sound of her breathing in fact, that he noticed every time she winced a little when a shot was loosened and quickly looked away in case it hit its mark. She did not join into the cheering and where she had been able to bring herself to clap politely at the beginning of the hunt, she now seemed past caring about such protocols. If she’d been an animal, he would now start to back away carefully as though a fuse had been lit within her.
Moira, however, wasn’t an animal and her fuse was directed inward, not outward. And so instead of backing away, he kept closer watch on her as she let her horse hang back toward the end of the group. At times, their eyes met, and he knew she was trying not to look at him but that artificially created need was forgotten when she had to avert her eyes from a kill. Sometimes they landed on him and they held the connection for a longing second or two before they both turned away. He didn’t feel any better in watching her than she did, but he had to. She was his charge and everything from her posture, her face, her breathing and her smell pointed to the fact that she was in trouble, hurting and afraid.
The forest was getting thicker, underbrush crackling underneath feet and hooves. Owain navigated it easily with the kind of inhuman grace he rarely displayed in armor, standing like a statue in the Keep’s corridors. The other men though, faltered from time to time, cursing the badly kept hunting grounds. Fairester was the one to rally them; an adventure in the wild, he said, no clear and clean forests stocked with docile deer like they found near the capital. This was the true wild of the eastern mountains, terra incognita, a hunter’s dream. Owain thought he saw Lord Rochmond’s nostrils flare but the old man, astride a noble steed did not comment.
Owain himself was not hunting. He carried his bow but he had yet to fire a single arrow; he did not hunt for sport. He hunted for food if need be, and his wolf did every full moon, but he felt no desire to compete with the strapping young men, vying for their benefactor’s attention and praise. Of course, Moira was the other reason, huge and looming over all the proceedings; her wincing and the way she held her breath when she looked away from a kill.
Almost subconsciously, he was drawing closer to her. Nobody was really paying attention, fallen back as she had, and even if actually talking to her was out of the question for many reasons, her scent in his nose got a little stronger. It wasn’t mere lust or longing that pulled him to her. If she fell, if something happened to her — none of them would see. Nobody would be there fast enough to help her. He could be; he had to be. It was an almost subconscious drive, when he sidestepped a tree on the side nearer to her rather than the other one, and then a bush and another tree. It felt good to be closer, both to him and the wolf inside his soul and he breathed her in deeply. However disguised her smell was by her obvious discomfort in the situation, underneath that she was still the wild and beautiful girl he had kissed under the pale face of the moon.
A commotion went through the group of riders then, the dogs and men on foot were splashing through a small creek and the first horses poised to jump, then leaped gracefully through the air. Their hooves landed hard on the ground but the trained beasts hardly faltered, continuing their trot through the undergrowth.
Owain, however, felt a sting of worry. All the men were sitting astride their horses, their feet in the stirrups easily able to feather off the impact and balance them on the mighty animal. Moira, however, was sitting on her sidesaddle; her breathing was strained and her eyes were following the different strands of motion with a kind of feverish uncertainty. The desire to make sure that she was safe overrode his other concerns and his steps brought him closer. He could see her better now, beads of sweat were glistening on her forehead; she looked exhausted and overwhelmed. She wasn’t a bad rider, though, he could tell. When the row of horses in front of her jumped, she took control of her reigns and her horse jumped. It just took a fraction of a second — but the saddle seemed to shift and the sight made Owain’s heart seize so painfully that he rushed a few more steps toward her.
In mid-jump, the horse’s head suddenly spun around to him, nostrils flared and ears pressed to its head in sudden panic. And then, with a gut-wrenching crack, it was over. For a heartbeat, the forest seemed utterly silent to Owain. But then Moira screamed.
Her horse had fumbled the landing; its broken bone was sticking out through the short fur
below the knee, bloody and grotesque. Its eyes were huge and full of pain before it sank down, tipping Moira out of the saddle. She fell, picked herself up, tripped on her dress and almost stumbled again before she braced herself against a tree, breathing hard. It all passed like a dream until Owain blinked and all the noise and the smells and colors came into sharp focus; a cacophony of shouts and barks and restless horses.
Before he dared to come closer, Sir Fairester was out of the saddle and tried to put his arms around her. Moira resisted, pleading for air, for space. She finally made it to her horse, gently brushing her fingers over its face. Both of them were shivering.
Owain buried his face in his hands. He couldn’t believe what he had done; years and years of experience with horses, with working in an army of foot soldiers and those on horseback and he had never made a mistake this bad. Horses didn’t generally panic at the smell of him. It just made them uncomfortable and nervous, but in that moment and fuelled by Moira’s own panic, her horse had paid the price for his carelessness.
Moira was shaking; she could almost feel the horse’s pain. The way she looked up at her, so afraid. She tried to talk to her, murmuring little promises she couldn’t keep while tears trickled down her cheeks. She hadn’t seen the break, kept her eyes averted from the sight of blood that never failed to make her queasy and shaky.
Everybody was staring, and where a moment ago, the forest had been echoing with the noise of the hunting party, it seemed unnaturally quiet now, ominously still. Stop looking at me, her insides screamed at them all, but outwardly, she was silent, kneeling by her injured horse while the rest of them watched unmoving.
Suddenly, a sound behind her; the crick-crack and stuffing sound of loading a musket. Moira turned around just in time to see Deagan coming up next to her, musket trained on her horse’s head.