The Druid Chronicles: Four Book Collection

by Phillips, Christina

  He pulled back to his side of the table, his face hardening into the impenetrable mask she’d not seen for days. “You’re right. It’s nothing to you.”

  A sense of injustice bubbled deep in her gut, curdling the wine, spiraling through her blood. How dared he take offense? Was she a cheap whore who offered a man relief not only with sex but a false sympathy for him to pour out his sins in hopes of being forgiven?

  She stabbed a piece of meat onto her knife with deadly precision. “I only wonder, since you’re so besotted, that you didn’t bring her with you. It’s not as if lodgings aren’t plentiful.” She tore the meat from her knife. It tasted of ashes.

  The silence screamed between them. She refused to look at him and concentrated on her lukewarm stew. The thought of eating it turned her stomach. But not as much as the thought of sharing the Gaul’s bed this night when he would doubtless, once again, be thinking of his wife as he took her.

  She knew she could refuse him. Perhaps she would. And her heart remained heavy within her breast.

  “You misunderstand.” His voice was emotionless. He may have been discussing the weather or the quality of their meal. “My wife died six years ago.”

  The grisly meat lodged in her throat and she choked. Tears prickled her eyes and she grabbed the amphora and took a long swallow straight from the source.

  Gods. She flicked him a glance over the amphora and saw he was staring at her dispassionately. As if their growing closeness over the last few days had never occurred.

  Shame burned through her at the cruel thoughts she’d leveled against his wife. It was one thing to curse the living. Quite another to curse those who were continuing their journeys.

  She swallowed around the scraped flesh of her throat. Druids were not taught to apologize to outsiders when in the wrong. Because Druids were so very rarely in the wrong.

  But then, she’d turned her back on her Druidry. And this was the result.

  She risked another glance. He was no longer looking at her but instead finishing his stew as if nothing untoward had passed between them. Her sweaty fingers ached around the knife and she placed it on the table before surreptitiously wiping her hands on the lap of her gown.

  “I regret your loss.” She stared at her plate, unable to look at him in case he dismissed her condolence as false. “I thought . . . I had the impression she was waiting for you back in Gaul.”

  He didn’t answer. Finally she could no longer bear the silence and looked up. He was regarding her but his expression was unreadable. Even his eyes appeared emotionless.

  Gods, it was intolerable she was in the position of having to defend herself before him. Why did she feel as if she were on trial? In a vague, insubstantial crevice of her mind she wondered why she felt the overpowering need to explain herself. What did it matter if he’d misunderstood her flash of anger?

  Wasn’t it better for him to assume his choice of wife disgusted her rather than the unpalatable truth that she had been jealous?

  Yes. And her upbringing had impressed upon her the importance of choosing wisely when it came to marriage and the creation of children. To fall in love with a slave was unfortunate. To marry her inconceivable. But despite the years of indoctrination it hadn’t been, and wasn’t, condemnation that pounded through her heart at his revelation.

  “No.” His voice was still even. “She no longer waits for me. The Druids took care of that.”

  Her fingers dug into her thighs as horrifying scenarios flashed through her mind. Druids weren’t violent by nature—Aeron had been a shocking anomaly—but retribution when their laws were violated was harsh and unforgiving.

  “What did they do?” Her whisper was scarcely audible. Before the invasion, had one of their nobles so blatantly disregarded the laws on matrimony, he would have been punished if he’d refused to recant. Exile was always a popular choice. But they would never have killed the woman. Not unless there was more to this than her Gaul was telling.

  “It’s more a question of what they didn’t do.” He took the amphora and shared the remainder of the wine between their goblets. “When her life hung in the balance they chose to heal me instead of saving her. And for that I will never forgive them.”

  Chapter 22

  Bren caught the look of horror that flashed across Morwyn’s face and downed half the goblet in one swallow. What the fuck was he doing, telling her about his personal life?

  He’d buried that life and lost his last sliver of self-respect three years ago when he’d taken on Dunmacos’ identity. And he hadn’t spoken of Eryn for even longer.

  But something about this night had loosened his tongue. He’d wanted to confide, to ease the poison in his soul. His unexpected freedom from the Legion, and the rush of relief and pleasure that had filled his chest when Morwyn returned to the lodgings, had obviously addled his brain. Corrupted his well-honed sense of survival.

  She’d been repelled. As had the majority of his kin. What else had he expected? Morwyn might attempt to pass herself off as a trader. And she may well have spent years as a slave of a Roman. But he was convinced she possessed the blood of nobility.

  And that blood had rejected the idea that love wasn’t foul simply because it crossed between one class and another.

  If she knew his true lineage, she’d be more revolted than ever by his perceived transgression. At least he’d had the presence of mind to dilute his heritage. Perhaps she’d be more forgiving, thinking he possessed only a drop of noble blood.

  What do I care for her good opinion? The question pounded against his temples, demanding an answer. She was nothing to him but a good fuck. A warm body in the heat of the night. A woman who, despite the circumstances of their initial encounter, never deferred to him or cowed in his presence.

  Morwyn. The first person, male or female, he’d been able to fully relax with in years. He didn’t know how or why, only that somehow she’d peeled back the icy armor protecting the core of his wounded psyche and slid inside. Illuminating his darkness with her quick tongue and the incandescent beauty of her radiant smile.

  A dull pain twisted through his chest. She had stayed with him so far because it suited her to go to Camulodunon, to visit her Roman friend. She had remained with him because he’d given her safe passage back to Cymru.

  He couldn’t fathom, now that he considered it, why she’d returned to the lodgings this night. She could have escaped, somehow, back to her village. She wasn’t like Eryn, who would never have attempted such a dangerous journey by herself.

  If Morwyn wanted to leave, she would have. But she’d returned. And that was why he’d just spilled his stinking guts to her.

  Had he expected sympathy? Understanding? He deserved neither. Would receive neither. And couldn’t comprehend why the knowledge seared the remnants of his shriveled soul.

  “They didn’t kill her?” Morwyn’s voice vibrated with revulsion but her eyes were locked with his and it wasn’t disgust he saw glittering in those enigmatic dark depths. It looked like fear.

  His gaze sharpened, and now he saw the way she leaned across the table toward him, her body taut, her face drawn. As if, far from condemning him, she was waiting for absolution.

  “No.” But he was distracted, trying to comprehend her strange reaction. There was no reason why Morwyn should empathize. He was seeing emotion where there was none.

  Yet still she gazed at him with that incomprehensible illusion of fear and anticipation.

  “Then . . .” She hesitated, clearly confused. “You despise them because they couldn’t save her life?”

  She appeared strangely preoccupied with details, when he expected slighting words over his choice of wife. In truth he’d hoped her years in slavery, no matter how pampered she’d been, had broadened her mind.

  He’d been wrong. She’d looked furious. But now his conviction wavered. Had she been disgusted by his confidence? Or had he misunderstood her initial reaction?

  Had she, instead, been trying to hide her shock
at his vitriolic outpouring against the Druids? As a member of the chieftain class, she would have been brought up to respect those cursed conduits of the gods.

  “No,” he said and again was distracted by the woman sitting opposite him, when until now the only woman who had ever distracted his mind had been Eryn. “They didn’t try.” And then the horror of that eve slashed through him, crippling with its brutality, and his chest constricted. “They let her bleed to death. She was unworthy of their sacred skills.”

  Morwyn blanched, as if he’d just physically assaulted her. As if she took the Druids’ callousness personally.

  “Did she perish in childbirth?” Her tone was so filled with anxiety it took a heartbeat for her actual words to penetrate.

  Childbirth? How had she reached that conclusion? For a moment he was blinded by her stupidity, and then reason punched through the ancient, simmering rage. He sucked in a deep breath. Why had he thought it a good idea to try to share a sliver of his past with Morwyn? His past was foul. He was beyond redemption.

  He didn’t want to discuss it anymore. Because every word he uttered could only condemn himself further in her eyes.

  She reached across the grimy table and curled her hand around his fist. Her touch was light yet firm. Completely unexpected.

  “Tell me.” Her voice was soft, compelling. “How did your wife die, Gaul?”

  Gaul. How would it feel to hear his true name on her lips? He didn’t want to contemplate it, because it would never happen. He’d always be her Gaul and, gods, that was fine because anything was better than hearing her call him Dunmacos.

  “We were attacked at night.” He’d been returning from a gathering of tribes in Gaul, where he’d represented his father. After three years of marriage his kin had finally, with varying degrees of reluctance, accepted his choice of wife, and once again he was involved in the political machinations of retaining his family’s remorseless grip on the power they retained beneath the Roman Empire.

  For no other reason than to prolong their time together away from the mantle of disapproval that still lingered in their home village, he’d decided to stay overnight in a hamlet. Nestled on the slopes of an inconspicuous valley, total population scarcely twelve, the danger of attack hadn’t even crossed his mind. Neither did it cross the minds of the two warriors who’d accompanied them on the journey, as they offered no protest when he told them to continue onward.

  Morwyn’s fingers tightened around his, as if in silent sympathy. She wouldn’t offer such solace if she could see into the evil pit of his soul.

  “They burned the hamlet to the ground. Murdered the men, raped the women and children and took whatever they didn’t kill as slaves.” Bren should have died that night, along with Eryn. But by the malevolence of the gods and the cursed ministrations of the Druids, he’d survived.

  Morwyn didn’t speak. But she didn’t look away either. He threaded his fingers through hers, rested his jaw against their joined hands.

  “Someone escaped. Roused the local rulers.” His kin. And they’d sent a contingent of warriors and two of the most highly skilled Druids.

  It had been too late. Drifting between this world and the next, he’d fought the Druids, his hoarse voice pleading with them to attend Eryn. To save his beloved.

  But they’d ignored him. And used their powers to harness his maddened spirit, to wrench it back into his corporeal body, to anchor him once more on the mortal plane.

  He was the one they had been sent to save. And by the time they finally deemed him capable of being moved, there was no one left in that ravaged hamlet who could benefit from their formidable skills.

  “Is it possible . . .” She hesitated, obviously unsure whether to continue. “Perhaps your wife was beyond their help before they arrived.”

  Smashed to a bloodied pulp, unable to move and scarcely able to draw breath into his damaged lungs, he’d still heard Eryn’s every terrified cry as the attackers had brutalized her. When he’d finally pushed his broken body onto his side to try to protect her, one of them launched a spear in his direction. And the world turned scarlet.

  Later, the Druids had proclaimed that the gods had guided the weapon, sparing his life, and he’d believed them. How else could he have survived such blood loss unless the gods wanted to keep him alive for their further vindictive pleasure?

  He rubbed her knuckles across his roughened jaw. Focused on her dark eyes, so full of compassion. He could almost allow himself to believe she felt something more than lust for him.

  “Perhaps she was.” It was the first time he’d ever acknowledged the possibility aloud, even though the thought had tortured him incessantly over the years. “But they had no intention of even trying. They ignored her as if she were nothing but a piece of bloodied meat.”

  Morwyn didn’t answer right away. Her other hand cradled his face, a tender gesture devoid of sexual overtones. A touch of comfort.

  She whispered words in a language he didn’t know. Yet eerie shivers snaked along his spine, as if somewhere deep inside his subconscious he recognized the foreign incantation. But before he could grasp their significance she trailed her fingers through his hair and the sensation splintered.

  And then she spoke. “It wasn’t your fault.”

  * * *

  Back in their room Bren watched Morwyn light two lamps and place them beside the bed. The ache in his heart was still there. Would always be there as a constant reminder of how he’d failed Eryn. But somehow, since sharing that small, vital segment of his past with Morwyn, the pain no longer crippled every breath he took.

  Unease slithered deep in his gut. He didn’t deserve even that modicum of peace. He searched his mind for Eryn’s face, focused on the fragile memory and heard once again her agonized cries as he’d struggled against oblivion.

  But the familiar guilt-soaked pain didn’t rip through his chest and tear open his heart. Instead, the hazy image of Eryn smiled at him, a tender smile, as if she forgave him for being unable to save her that night.

  The smile he saw so often during his tangled nightmares. Her unequivocal forgiveness, a shining star piercing his blood-drenched existence. The forgiveness he’d refused to acknowledge for so many torturous years.

  He couldn’t allow her to forgive him. Because he could never forgive himself.

  “Gaul.” Morwyn’s voice dragged him back to the present. She was standing in front of him, tall and proud, her dark braid snaking over her shoulder to her waist. Her gaze caught his and didn’t waver. “Within these four walls . . . do you trust me?”

  He trusted her enough to tell her something he’d not told another soul in six years. He’d trusted her not to poison him in Camulodunon, or thrust her dagger through his heart when they arrived back in Cymru.

  Did he trust her?

  “As much as you trust me.”

  A small smile quirked the corners of her lips, but vanished in an instant. With a stab of surprise he realized she wasn’t as confident as she appeared. He wrapped his hand around her braid and tugged gently, tracing the knuckles of his other hand along her jaw.

  “I trust you more than perhaps I should.” Again she smiled and again he caught the flicker of uncertainty behind her words. “I fear it crept upon me unawares.”

  How easy it would be to tell her the truth. Morwyn was strong, brave. She’d know the necessity for silence. For stealth. She could even assist in his cover, provide alibis for when he needed to meet with Caratacus.

  The vision glowed bright in his mind for one glorious moment before turning to ash.

  He would never put her in such danger. The life he’d chosen was a solitary one, and the fewer people who knew of his true identity, the safer they all were. Besides, he’d promised to escort her back to her home village. He wondered why she hadn’t reminded him. He wouldn’t offer. Perhaps she’d decide to stay in the town.

  For a while.

  “Within these four walls,” he said, “I trust you with my life.”

&n
bsp; She cradled his face in a tender gesture, as if she were holding something infinitely precious. He savored the sensation, relished the thought, even as cold reality seeped through his consciousness.

  Morwyn had no such finer feelings for him. And even if she did, should she discover the depths to which he’d sunk, the atrocities he’d committed, her affection would wither and pollute her soul.

  Another reason why he could never allow her to discover who he truly was.

  “I don’t want your life.” Her voice was soft and her fingertips grazed his throat, hovered as if fascinated over his pulse. “I only want to look at you. As you have looked at me.”

  Instinctively he tensed. “No.” It was harsh. Nonnegotiable. The thought of her recoiling from the hideous sight of his body caused his guts to clench in denial.

  She rested the palms of her hands against his shoulders, and her heat seeped through the material of his tunic and branded his flesh.

  “Please.” Her voice was a breathy whisper. “Just this once. Just for this night. Let me see you as you are.”

  “That’s the one thing you never want to see, Morwyn.”

  She gave an oddly vulnerable smile that caused a strange pain deep in his chest. “I’ve seen the scars of battle before, Gaul. For a warrior, you’re astonishingly vain about preserving the illusion of your beauty.”

  A short laugh huffed from his mouth. Unexpected. He didn’t mean to laugh. Except when he was with Morwyn he couldn’t seem to help himself.

  “I have no such vanity with regard to my beauty.” What an extraordinary choice of word she’d used. “But these aren’t battle scars. They’re—” The words choked his throat. Because they were his scars of shame. Of degradation. The scars that reminded him every moment of every day that he had survived.