Why I tormented myself so, I could not say. Only that the compulsion to watch, to know, to slice my heart was greater than even the unendurable pain it brought.
And so for the next three nights I watched—and healed.
~ ~ ~
“Go. Hunt,” Yseult insisted to Tris when our stores ran low on the seventh day since he’d wounded me, rendering me unable to run and hunt for us, though I was gaining better strength of that leg daily.
“I will not leave you two here alone.”
“Then your jealousy will see us starve,” Yseult shot back.
On the morning of the eighth day, Tris, goaded as much by shame as by the rumble in his gut, crept from the cave with Failnaught and a fistful of arrows, thinking both Yseult and I slept too deep to hear him leave.
I, in turn, crept to Yseult’s side. She had already stirred awake.
I lay beside her, simply wanting acknowledgement and the comfort of her familiar scent.
She didn’t protest. “I can’t love you,” she said. “Not enough.”
I had told Brangien the same. The lesson she’d taught from that was still fresh.
“You are a healer,” I said. “Heal me again. One last try to lift the curse. And when it’s done, I’ll return to Father and pack and leave you and Tris to your love and life.”
Her sad eyes may have been fixed on mine but they were looking into my soul. “Do you really think you could leave… after?”
“I know it’s only impossible for me to leave now.”
“What is it you truly want?”
“Truly? To bask freely in your sweet body. To bathe in your tears. For you to give me your heart just long enough to lift this curse. I’d pray for the change to be swift—and that it would erase all memory of these last few months with you.”
“Are those memories of me so painful?”
“To the contrary, my Lady. I’d be comparing any future love, future happiness to the unattainable that is you the rest of my life. And fae live so very long. What humanity has taught me is vulnerability and how much your shorter life gives cause to praise its every moment. I’ve already buried my love in you. Curse or no, indulge this human flesh once more. I beg you.”
Trembling with my need of her, I surrendered myself to her command.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
YSEULT
Ah, Des. To throw temptation at me now. Though, to be fair, there was no day together he did not tempt. No time together when my body did not recall his tender prowess and long for his singular touch.
It was never a question of Tris being able to satisfy me. We slaked and sated ourselves daily. Exhausted ourselves in satisfaction. And still one smoldering look from him or the brush of his hand on mine could ignite my heart. Even when he was being a stupid, stubborn, and selfish fool, blinded by love, my body delighted in his and could not be swayed from its love.
With no Des in the world, Tris would happily be my all—my sun by day and my moon at night.
With no Des in the world, there would be no hollow in my heart nor ache in my loins that Tris did not fill fully, boldly and more than satisfactorily.
But with Des… It was not that I loved Tris less or found flaw in his touch. It was as though Des expanded my heart, found love for me to give that was not there before him. In that same way, my body found new need in his presence.
And now here he was before me, begging my help to make him whole. Asking to embrace that hollow of my heart and that piece of my desire that were his irrevocably.
How could I say no?
I met his supplication with open arms. “Come,” I whispered. “Let us make you fae once more.”
I traced my memories of him with breath and hand and tongue. He rewarded me with sweet groans and a risen staff that quivered with anticipation. It was a slow hurry we indulged in, not knowing when Tris might return. But when Des kissed me there, I arched against him and cried out with desperate need. “Now. Please,” I begged him, pulling him up, lips to mine.
He took my wrists and held them to the cave floor as he poised above me. He was longer than Tris and not so thick, but my body remembered, accepting him with delight. My breath shuddered and my eyes closed as I approached the peak.
“Look at me.” The soft command dragged my eyes to his. In their emerald depths I saw a soul laid bare, filled with a history of anguish and joy and the purity of love. Briefly I wondered what my eyes revealed to him. Then I was lost to thought completely as all of heaven shattered within me.
By sheer will I kept my eyes open, gifting Des with the honesty of the moment, of me.
Then the radiance of his smile poured over me, blinding in its intensity. Only then did I shut my eyes, even as he collapsed over me and held me in his arms.
What seemed an eternity later but in truth could not have been more than a few moments, I found my voice to ask, “What of the curse?”
“It holds true.” Regret nearly broke him.
“I love you,” I insisted.
“I know,” he said and his gentle touch as he brushed back a strand of hair from my eye only deepened that love. He repeated my mantra back to me. “Just not enough.”
~ ~ ~
We had only finished dressing when Fallax thundered up, Tris throwing himself from the saddle and storming into the cave. His hard gaze swept from me to Des and back again. I could almost taste his disappointment at finding us clothed and out of each other’s arms.
“An unsuccessful hunt, was it?” Des asked
I struggled to hide my smile, and Des and I exchanged a look of secret laughter, pity, guilt.
Tris, of course, had every right to fear betrayal. It was just the manner of his current madness that went beyond the pale.
“What troubles you, my Lord?” I ran my palm across his brow in a futile attempt to calm him. I would have had as much luck trying to calm a storm-torn sea.
He guessed at the truth, whether by his own delusions or the easy and intimate looks Des and I exchanged. Grabbing my wrist, he twisted it back. There was anger enough within him to snap it, but he only held it captive.
“I ask again, my Lady, have you been unfaithful?”
“The fae remains a man. Is that not proof enough?”
Obvious to Des, it wasn’t, but I was reluctant to lie outright to Tris. Not when the truth was many-layered.
Some instinct kept his guard up. Maybe it was the slightest sheen of sweat on Des and I in the cool of the cave. Maybe he caught the subtle scent of our morning labor. “I wish it were enough.”
“Then what will be enough?” I threw back at him. “Will only Des’ death satisfy you? Or your death if you thought this through with your head and not that cod of yours . Is your conviction of his guilt so great it blinds you and saps all sense away? When God upholds his innocence, Des will best you, perhaps slay you. Dead, you cannot love me, and if you’re willing to risk my love in battle, perhaps you don’t love me so deeply as you love the thought of love. Or maybe you don’t love at all save for what the spell commands. Maybe you will insist on fighting Des because death by his hand is an honorable way to quit the spell and be done with the distasteful love it forces on you.”
I was mindful still of my fragile wrist in his powerful hand as I stirred him to wrath.
Des laid his hand over ours, a protective gesture that ignited some deep emotion in all of us at the touch. It fled quickly, but I saw wist and regret flit across Tris’ otherwise stony face.
Des must have seen it too, for he lifted his other hand. At this point it could have as easily gone to the hilt of the sword Des has so hastily belted on. Instead, it alit on the burl of Tris’ shoulder while a trailing finger stroked his bearded cheek in passing.
“Perhaps, Your Grace,” Des said, “it’s time you asked whether Tris has been unfaithful to you.”
It took either a hero or a fool to knowingly provoke an angry bear, and both Des and I were doing our best to anger it more. My eyes widened, not so much at what this be
ar might do but at what Des was implying. “You and he?”
“In this very cave.” He stared only at Tris, gaze and voice both soft. Without seeming to move at all, suddenly he was head by head with Tris, his breath close enough to caress the other man’s ear. “Do you remember how we took comfort in each other, pleasured one another? I remember every plane of you, every peak, every moan, every thrill of you.” He moved closer still, till his lips were nearly on Tris. “Do you remember me?”
Tris swallowed hard and my heart beat fast.
“No betrayal,” Tris groaned. “Yseult was always there between us. Never did my heart betray.”
“Do you not love him?” I asked.
“No!”
Des didn’t flinch, merely crossed the final space between and captured Tris’ protest on his lips.
I watched with fascination, my wrist still in Tris’ hard grip. I waited for any spark of jealousy to engulf me. There was none. Not even in knowing they had shared the same bed as Des and I, Tris and I. I felt no threat in their lust for one another knowing it was I who had their hearts.
“Not every act of love is a betrayal,” I whispered.
Tris pulled back his head, but he didn’t pull away. “Then you and Des have not betrayed me?” It was still a challenge, but this time tempered with an unspoken plea that craved the accusation to be a lie.
“I am no less innocent than you,” Des said.
My heart stopped. The sun stopped. No one of us was innocent yet no one of us had betrayed another. Not in the ways that mattered most. But if Des were to confess the cave’s other secrets—those between him and me—what might Tris in his madness do?
“Nine days ago you asked if I had betrayed you,” Des continued. “My answer then was I had not. That I had never lain with Yseult, our queen. By that claim I stand.”
I approved. It was truth precise. We had not lain together between the time I’d become queen and nine days ago when Tris had issued challenge. It was a claim he and I could both swear before God.
“Will you not put aside this foolish trial?” I demanded. “I said before I would not watch you die. Nor would I see your friendship put asunder. Spelled or no, I love you, Tris, though I hate what jealousy has made you become. And Des, although I hate what circumstance has forced on you, I love you as well. As friend and confidante and more. As one who can chase away the terrors of the night when I am otherwise alone. To both of you I give my heart, in different size and different ways. Even to Mark I must cede a piece because duty, too, is a form of love. It matters not what Heaven or Avalon or the courts of men decide. Truth is that which we find deepest within our hearts.”
Neither Tris nor Des had moved in all this time. Breathspace close still they stood. I stepped into the hollow beside them, our breaths mingled now as one.
“Look past jealousies and spells and curses. Look into your hearts. What song does your heart sing? Mine has many parts and many refrains. For family parted. For Brangien, lost. For Mark, honored. For Des, revered. And for Tris, all else. No part may be silenced without this song becoming another, one less lovely, less harmonious.”
Grief now filled the space in Tris’ eyes where madness once had been. It was not denials of our betrayal but affirmations of our love that would heal him.
“Mark was as a father to you. Des as a brother. Do you love them any less?”
Tris shook his head.
Des lifted his hand then from shoulder to cheek. “Nor have we stopped loving you.”
How strange was it to see the man who would be fae professing that enduring love. Accepting…
I inhaled sharply, the healer at last seeing yet another way to heal.
Tris wasn’t the only one touched by madness here.
I laid my free hand over Des’ heart, our little circle now complete.
Startled, wary, as if I he knew what I would say, Des flicked his gaze to me.
With all gentleness I asked him, “Did you ever stop loving Brinn?”
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
PALOMIDES
“Yes!”
My answer came without thought. Of course I had. I stopped loving Brinn the day she rode off with Pel and Alaine and abandoned me. And if not that day, then the day I laid eyes on Yseult. And if not that day, then the first time I lay with Yseult and my heart began to sing another harmony… And if not then…
“No. I only stopped loving what I thought she’d become. She sings within me still. Quieter now and without the strains of desire that once reverberated so loudly as to drown all but the drum of my father and the songs of my pack. But Brinn’s song, for all its pain, is still one of joy and hope.”
“Why?” Yseult pressed.
“Because she is… happy.”
With a sigh, I closed my eyes. It had been a journey of many months to understand that love was never selfish. That love had to be free to find its course. And that love wasn’t finite—that it grew to encompass everything, and everyone, we were destined to love, no matter their form, their heritage, or their sex.
My head bowed in acceptance. This curse would be mine for eternity. I could never give Yseult all my love, for I would never stop loving Brinn. Or Tris.
Because love at its best was never pure. It was colored with all the loves of our life.
Yseult’s hand rose to cup my chin. I felt her gentle lips on mine as she boldly took them not a handspan from Tris’ own. “Know you always sing in my heart too.”
I surrendered then to Yseult, to Tris, to Brinn, to Fate.
Because love also demanded sacrifice and pain.
I felt heat at my hip then, running down the length of my leg, up to my waist, my chest.
Desperately I clung to Yseult and Tris, their eyes wide with question as my grip on them tightened painfully. I clung to their love, their humanity, their hearts. Clung until the heat grew to an inferno, unbearable against my flesh.
Shoving my way from them, I stripped away belt and sword and scabbard, flinging them across the cave.
“It burns!” I cried. Panic tore at my voice. Terror gripped me. One moment I was a man accepting the burden of my fate, accepting the division of my heart. The next I was fae, and Yseult and Tris, unafraid, captured me in their arms, murmuring words of concern drowned by the roar of blood pounding in my ears.
Then I heard them, smelled them, sensed them. Others. “Men!”
A stallion’s bugle punctuated my cry of alarm. A second then a third horse answered.
Tris shoved us further into the cave, out of the light at its mouth, and kicked at the fire.
“Take my sword,” I whispered urgently. It was useless to me now. I couldn’t bear its touch for long, the iron in its steel anathema to me again.
He grabbed its hilt and stripped it from its scabbard just as I stripped myself bare in the shadows.
“You will sing in my heart, always and forever,” I swore to them both.
I shifted then. Of my own choosing once more. Where before hound and man had been as two, this hound was no less me than the fae who a moment before had stood naked before them.
Tris gripped my sword and a different kind of madness lighted his eyes.
Yseult behind, Tris to one side and I to the other, with nowhere to run, we waited for the men without to enter.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
PALOMIDES
Six men, seven, eight—Mark’s men—they swarmed in with swords at the ready, their number giving them confidence none would have alone.
I snarled and Tris leveled my sword at the men who threatened. We would die here, but not without a fight.
But we had not considered the even greater threat that appeared from behind. Looking every bit the queen she was, even in her ragged shift and unbrushed hair, Yseult fearlessly stepped forward, laying her hand over the blade’s bare edge.
“I told you I would not watch you die,” she said, and the calm of her voice chilled through me. Then it dropped to an urgent whisper. “My freedom is forfeit. N
ow both of you, fly!”
She stumbled, apparently half-fainting, into the path of the two nearest knights, blocking their swords as they moved instinctively to catch her. I launched myself at a third, ripping at his blade arm then turned for the throat of a fourth equally unprepared to deal with the likes of me.
A man of lesser strength and power could never have forced his way past the four who still had chance to stop him. Tris blustered at them, beating back their blades, the trap of the small cave working to his advantage.
I lunged toward the knot of men who momentarily held Tris at bay. A backward blow from the flat of a blade caught me and tumbled me away. That distraction was all Tris needed to batter through the last of them. Free he might still could help Yseult where dead he never could.
I heard him sprinting for Fallax. No knight’s horse was built for speed, but as man and horse thundered their escape over the rocky cliff, I knew only my own horse could ever hope to catch them, though three knights rode after him to try.
Three knights gone after Tris. The knight with the bloodied arm who was wrapping the neck of a fifth knight who would likely bleed his life out before noon. One knight holding Yseult. That left only two to deal with, and I was already grotto-side of one of them
I could have followed Tris. I could have fled Cornwall altogether. Left these men to their game and returned once more to my own kith and kin.
I saw my chance to run, fae and hound tempted by the freedom offered.
But my heart was shackled still to the woman who stood defiantly in the hard grip of a Cornish knight, the storm in her eyes raging, her chin lifted in pride.
Tris was yet free to find a way to rescue her, and this time I would not abandon her.
So I growled warning at those last two knights.
“Call off your dog,” one of them commanded Yseult.
“Quiet!” she ordered, her expression, directed toward me, stern and accusing. I obeyed. “Go!” she ordered next. Though I had no intention of leaving her altogether, I skulked from the cave, making certain she saw I did not leave the grotto but waited there as the knights mounted up and one placed her on his horse’s withers before the saddle and held her there with an intimate arm.
Queen's Heart: An Arthurian Paranormal Romance (Arthurian Hearts Book 2) Page 19