She paused, lips still not quite steady, his beloved bride, his cherished wife.
“Please,” he said simply. “I need your help. I know you can do it, if you want to.”
“Don’t you think I want to help you?” she asked, and the tremble was more pronounced. “Don’t you think I would if I could? What you ask is impossible! It does not exist!”
He had pushed her too far; he could see it clearly. She wasn’t ready for this, she couldn’t think beyond her fear right now, and how it hurt to watch her struggle against him, against his beliefs and hopes. Worst of all, to cause her pain.
“No, all right,” he said, soothing. “I’m sorry, truelove. I’m sorry. I know you want to help.”
He crossed to her and kissed her quickly, before she could reject him physically, on top of her words.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered again, against her lips. “Forget what I said.”
He kissed her again, slower, softer, letting her tension drain away, until she was kissing him back, returning his heat with a new ardor, the desire in her awakened again. His own responded instantly and their embrace changed to match this new purpose; together they sank down on the carpet of flowers in front of the fireplace.
He put her on top of him, relishing the slight weight of her, the way her hair loosened easily from its pins when he found them, the way it fell down in heavy locks of silver and ivory around him when he stroked her cheeks and brought her closer to him, the way her eyes grew sleepy yet full of violet fire. All for him.
Marcus let his hands roam her back, her hair, across the tartan she wore, his own mark on her, and then underneath it, to the plain gown, closer to her body.
She stretched against him, answering his unspoken lead with her movements, with an understanding that wasn’t there just days ago, but now, oh yes, how sweetly she knew what to do to him, how to touch him, where to kiss him—
“Laird? Are ye there?”
Avalon became perfectly still; Marcus kept his hands in place on her, holding her to him, and turned his head to the door. Thank God he had shut it behind them when they entered.
“Not now,” he said distinctly.
“Begging yer pardon, laird, but the Moor sent me for ye. We’ve got a problem in the stables.”
“What problem?” Marcus asked, beginning to caress his wife’s hair again. “Part of the roof’s come down, laird, from the snow, mayhap. Five of the stalls are ruined, and young Jack near broke his arm trying to get to one of the horses—”
Avalon sat up and Marcus came up with her, pulling her to her feet.
“I’ll be right there,” he said to the door.
She looked up at him, and the violent fire had transformed to worry.
“I’m sorry,” he began, his same old refrain with her.
“Shall I come with you?”
“Nay,” he replied. “Stay inside, where it’s warm.” He caressed her cheek. “I wish that we had time—”
“Go,” she said, smiling. “And be careful. There’ll be time enough tonight. I had promised Tegan I would visit about now, anyway.”
He looked at her, blank.
“The cook,” she said gently.
They went to the door together, and he gave her one last kiss, hard and passionate so she would be thinking of this, and not of his ill-timed request, before walking away from her.
Ach, milady, are ye certain ye wish to do this? I meant to go over the stockroom with ye, not oblige ye to labor.”
Tegan looked almost distraught at the sight of the bride with a chopping knife in her hand, a pile of turnips in front of her.
“I offered to help. You didn’t oblige me,” Avalon pointed out. “I want to. I enjoy it. And there will be plenty of hungry men coming in from the stables soon. I think you could use some extra hands.”
“Aye, well, that’s true enough,” Tegan admitted, with a harried look at the kitchen.
The stable disaster, though hardly epic, was enough to throw the castle household into a frenzy of activity, with most of the men outside working quickly to repair the damage before darkness set in, and another snowstorm arrived. People bustled back and forth from the buttery to the stables to the great hall, carrying the news that it wasn’t as bad as initially feared. None of the horses were injured, none of the stablehands had been standing too close to the broken beams. But there was a gaping hole in the roof, and the threat of more snow plain in the air. It was going to take a great deal of hurried labor to fix it in time.
Avalon began to chop her turnips with determination, finding solace in the busyness of the kitchen, the voices of the women she had come to know all around her. Everyone, from oldest to youngest, banded together in a crisis. The Clan Kincardine functioned as one to deal with the problems they were dealt.
To her right was Greer, attacking her own pile of vegetables with gusto; and to her left little Inez, collecting the small chunks of turnips into her basket for boiling.
The kitchen was hot despite the weather, with three full fires going, women everywhere talking, tossing laughter back and forth.
Avalon listened to the banter with half an ear, the other half of her lost in the repetition of her movements, the keen knife she held picking up the firelight and letting it slide in a golden glow along the blade.
What harm? asked a voice in her head, the one thing she didn’t wish to hear right now: the secret tones of her chimera.
What harm would there be to look? it invited, not unfriendly.
She ignored it, grabbing another turnip, whacking the knife down into it to split it in two.
A simple thing, no harm to look, it suggested, her ally, her enemy.
The turnip fell into quarters. Into eighths.
For us, Marcus had said, I’m asking you for us.…
To sixteenths.
No harm to look.
Small pieces, yellow and white, chopped even smaller, the blade glowing.
No harm.
She watched the blade as it missed its mark, skipped off the side of a juicy square of turnip and landed deep into the flesh of her palm near her thumb, too close for safety. She watched as her blood came up immediately, and curiously enough it didn’t hurt at all, not at all, but instead seemed to be a thing of fascination; crimson red against the blade now, spilling onto the wood of her chopping block so quickly. Staining the paleness of her hand.
Avalon followed the line of her blood as it pooled up and then hung, suspended on the edge of the block, gathering mass, growing too big to stay there much longer.
Distantly she heard noises: bizarre, exaggerated sounds that might have been other people exclaiming at her. It didn’t seem to matter what they said, she couldn’t understand them anyway.
The drop of blood fell. She was able to watch it go, all the way down to the stone floor, a perfect teardrop shape, oddly beautiful, deep red, flawless.
It splashed into a circle against the charcoal stone, the center of it bouncing back up, reaching free of the ground, then releasing its form to fall down again. Her red, red blood—
—was flowing everywhere, it soaked the furs and the clothing, a sticky drying stiffness wherever it touched.
In the darkness it was not red but black, with a dusky glitter in the torchlight, still fresh enough the reek of death.
She couldn’t see, it was so dark, the torch was too far away to aid her, and the death was too close. The danger here was so strong it would overpower her, it would draw out all the blood and leave her empty, alone, dead.
The room was too large; it was familiar and yet not, a dream place, huge and foreboding. Danger and death hid so easily here, the shadows were their masking. She could not fight these shadows, she could not stop them, and would never have thought that the stifling blackness of the pantry could be equalled in so great a space.
Goblins, blood, danger, cold stone, the room was too wide, she couldn’t hide from it, she would die now, just as her father had, and Ona, and all the rest, and all the bloo
d would never erase her loss, sticky sweet blood, her own death a half second away, laughing at her—
Avalon Kincardine came out of her trance and fainted for the first time in her life, falling into the arms of the women surrounding her, spilling her own blood freely down onto her skirts.
Chapter Fourteen
She was warm and yet shivering. There was a soft, heavy weight on her chest, her torso and legs. Her left hand throbbed with a sharp ache.
“Do not fear,” she heard someone saying, the voice strangely accented. “It could have been far worse. The vein is closed now.”
“Just in time.” It was another man’s voice, deeper, strained, and she knew it so well she opened her eyes.
“Avalon,” said Marcus, his face stark with relief, standing over her, picking up the hand that did not hurt.
She began to sit up, dizzy, and he helped her, settled her gently against the pillows of the bed. She was in the master chambers. She still could not yet quite think of it as her own. The vivid colors of the sky outside the windows told her it was either the end of the day, or the beginning of a new one.
“Be careful,” Marcus was urging her. “You’ve lost a lot of blood.”
“I feel fine,” she said, though that wasn’t quite true.
The wizard appeared beside Marcus, hands folded away into his sleeves. “Were you in battle, lady, it would have been a fine blow to your enemy’s hand.”
She thought this might be a joke and so gave a small smile, and the wizard smiled back.
“You are hale again,” he pronounced. “Though I am uncertain of your husband.”
Marcus ignored him. “How do you feel? Do you remember what happened?”
“I feel fine. I—”
Blood, goblins, death!
Stop!
“I’m not sure I remember.” She closed her eyes against his look, leaning her head back.
She felt the silence more than she heard it: doubt, caution, the fear of exhausting her. If these were the things that would divert their questions, then she would pretend, even though she was not tired. Even though she remembered it all.
“Perhaps you should consider the matter again, lady,” advised the wizard, breaking the moment. “You would do well to share any memory with the Kincardine.”
Avalon opened her eyes and looked past Marcus, who was frowning, to Balthazar, a figure of black against the pageantry of the sky. He shrugged gracefully.
“A husband and wife should be comfortable in each other’s own true hearts. Or so it is said among my people.”
She glanced away to the bright sunset colors, guilty, and heard the wizard speak again, light and indifferent.
“Well, perhaps here marriage is different.”
He began to walk out of the room, pausing by the door.
“But it is a cold thing, is it not, to be alone?”
And he left.
“What the hell was that all about?” asked Marcus.
Avalon looked down at the blankets covering her, then began to try to move them off of her. “This is silly. I should be up. I am not hurt.”
Marcus stopped her, placing one hand on her shoulder and pushing her back again. “Avalon, you sliced open a vein in your hand in the kitchen tonight. Do you remember that? You bled a great deal before we could stop it.”
“Oh,” she said. “But I feel all right now.”
“You’re staying here,” he said firmly. “Loss of blood can be a dangerous thing. I will not allow you to harm yourself.”
“I will not harm myself,” she said, exasperated. “All I want is to get up and—”
“No!” he said, much too loudly, surprising her into silence.
One of the windowpanes rattled with a gust of wind, a lonely, chattering sound in the quiet of the room.
Marcus sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “I’m sorry.” There was a tight smile on his lips, pained. “I’m always saying that to you, aren’t I? You must be tired of it.”
“Are you?” she asked.
He sighed again and stood up; there was a restlessness marking him now, an impatience in the lines of his body as he stalked to the window.
“I’ve seen men die from a simple thing like the cut you had,” he said. “The life just drains out of them along with the blood. It’s an appalling thing to watch.”
The pane began to rattle again but this time Marcus stopped it, touching his fingers to the frame, stilling it so the wind became nothing more than a faint murmur against the approaching night.
“I’m not about to die,” she said.
“No,” he responded. “I won’t let you.” His head dropped suddenly, rested against the colors of the glass. “I’m tired,” he admitted, and to her it sounded like a confession.
“Come to bed.” She pulled back the covers beside her.
“There’s more work to be done. I should be down there.”
Avalon waited, unmoving, until he turned around and faced her. She placed her hand on the jumbled pile of covers and let it rest there.
Marcus gave a small laugh. “Bal seems to think we should be comfortable in each other’s true hearts.”
“So he said.”
“But that can be a dangerous thing, Avalon. I’m not so certain you would find comfort in mine.”
“I know there is nothing there to fear,” she said steadily.
“Do you?”
“Yes.”
“What confidence you have in me, my lady. I am sure it is undeserved.”
“Marcus,” she said. “I wouldn’t mislead you. I think I know your heart already.”
“By the time I was eighteen,” he said, keeping his gaze on her hand, “I had taken part in some of the worst atrocities that I could have ever imagined. I watched entire armies hack each other to death over religion. I watched civilized men—men who claimed to have the grace of God—behave like scavenging animals in defenseless villages. I had even seen my own knight murdered in front of me, and all of it paled in front of the acts of a few select men. Monks, they called themselves.”
Why was he telling her about this now? Then she recalled the burning memories of the sand, the desert, the killing thirst, and Avalon thought she could guess his reasons.
“Like Balthazar?” she asked.
“No. Not like him, though from a close order. They had seemed kind men, even magnificent at first. They nursed me through my wounds when I was too injured to do it myself. Trygve, you see, had decided we should free Damascus, just the two of us. He died within minutes of breaching the city gate. Really, there was nothing else the sentries could do, he was obviously quite insane. And since I was his squire, a fellow infidel, they did their best to kill me too.”
He began to slide to the floor, using the wall as his guide, until he was sitting on the stone, arms relaxed over his knees. “But Bal came and evened the odds.”
“He saved you?”
“In a manner of speaking. He drew off the men and allowed me to limp away, and even managed to find me later and drag me back to the monastery. It was outside the city, you see, and mostly untouched by the war. And those monks did their best to heal me.”
She saw the image of the wooden crucifix covered in sand, the hot white walls, the table with the man strapped to it. Her mouth grew dry again.
“Did they?” she asked.
“At first,” he said. The tightness was back in him, the ominous herald to the snake just beneath his skin.
Avalon feared that to lead him further down this path would only strengthen its hold on him; and yet, and yet—if she was careful, if she treated it as delicately as she could, then perhaps she would find the hawk instead of the snake, and the torment would fade away in the light of the man she knew was there.
“And then what?” She kept her voice impartial, giving the snake no reason to strike out.
“I had a dream about you, Avalon, did you know that?”
The sudden switch of subject made her wary, made her watch him closely
. She felt the uneasy stirrings of her curse, the chimera.
“You were an angel in the desert,” he continued, meeting her look, pale blue winter. “You were redemption. Do you remember?”
The chimera awoke, looked at her, daring her to deny it.
“It was your dream,” she said.
“You were there. Only not at the time. Thank God, not at the time.”
“I don’t understand,” she said, afraid to.
“Those men in my solar,” he said abrubtly, savagely, “those men of God. They would have killed me for this meager gift, a long and painful death for only a fragment of what you possess. And do you truly wonder that I would not let them take you? Do you wonder at that at all?”
“It was the monks,” she said, putting it together, what he had not, or would not say. “It was the monks who did that to you, who tortured you.” She shook her head, fighting back the horror. “But why?”
He wouldn’t look at her now, every muscle seemed taut with emotion; a brittle, fragile hold on his will the only thing keeping the snake at bay.
“It seems I had a fever, in the middle of that desert heat. A strong fever, that kept me babbling for hours. And how unlucky it was, just then, to have one of the only two monks there who spoke English tending to me. He understood every word I said. And apparently, I said a great deal.”
The chimera listened, nodding.
“I don’t even remember what happened.” Marcus gave a hollow laugh to the ceding, and it echoed back, shaded with despair. “I couldn’t understand, when the fever dispersed, why I was tied up. Why I was being questioned. Why these men, who had been my friends, were now out to kill me in the most painful and prolonged of ways.”
Renounce, said the chimera, using that gentle voice of the dream.
Marcus addressed the word he could not have heard. “Renounce what? I had no idea. All they would say is that the devil had my soul, my body was its instrument, and they were going to drive it away.”
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