Shana Abe

by The Truelove Bride

  “There!” she cried, pointing to Marcus on the floor, almost pushing the wizard toward him in her anxiety.

  “A torch,” bellowed the wizard, and men rushed to comply, carrying the flames over their heads.

  Claudia let out a fresh wail, cringing, prompting several of the men to turn to her, assessing.

  “It was her,” said Avalon to the man nearest her, she couldn’t see who, perhaps Sean. “She did it. Hold her.”

  She didn’t wait to see that her order was followed. In the next second she was running to Marcus, the wizard, the other men crouched in a circle, pushing her way through until she could see Marcus clearly.

  His eyes were open. He was looking for her, trying to sit up against all the others who were trying to hold him down.

  “Marcus,” she said, and had to smile so she wouldn’t cry in front of him. She was so suddenly exhausted that she almost collapsed onto the floor beside him, but that was all right, because he was still alive, and that was all that mattered.

  He relaxed when he saw her, going back down to the ground, supported by his men. Avalon took his nearest hand in her own, holding it tightly, trying to maintain her smile even though her eyes were blurring.

  The wizard was muttering something under his breath, examining both arrow strikes, his hands clever and deft. Almost everyone was saying something, drowning out each other, putting together the story, though Avalon and Marcus remained locked on each other, ignoring the questions.

  In the background, Claudia’s wailing grew louder.

  At last Balthazar looked up at Marcus and shook his head with a reluctant grin. “I knew you were a lucky man, Kincardine. But perhaps it is time to give luck a respite. You push the limits of even the most patient.”

  Marcus matched his grin, though it was not so strong, and said something to the wizard in that flowing language that went too fast to comprehend.

  The wizard laughed, then turned to Avalon.

  “Your husband will live, lady. But you will have to loan him a sling. I think the pink would look best on him, don’t you?”

  He wore a sling of gray, not pink, sturdy wool cut from someone’s tunic, and still he chafed at it, obviously annoyed at the inconvenience of recovering from near death.

  The pink sash remained safe at Sauveur, because they would not be leaving to return there for at least another week, in order to give Marcus time to begin healing.

  A day, Marcus had countered.

  A week, repeated the wizard firmly.

  Two weeks, Avalon threw in, just to make clear she was serious about him staying.

  They settled on one week, Marcus giving in with much grumbling, but she felt no remorse at his fidgeting. He had been shot twice with a crossbow at relatively close range and yet lived, perhaps a testament to the wizard’s suggestion that luck favored a rogue.

  And he did look like a rogue, Avalon admitted to herself, walking alone through her mother’s winter garden. She had awakened early today and watched him sleep for close to two hours in the room that used to be her own, the frosted branches of the old birch tree clearly visible from the window. His hair was long and loose, never releasing the waves of beauty that framed his face. The stubble on his cheeks gave his skin a blue-gray cast, but the rest of him looked hale, and his breathing was normal. He had no fever.

  In the three days that had passed since they arrived at this abandoned place, much had been restored. It was a relief to her, watching Trayleigh reclaim the polish it used to have, though the process was slow and far from finished.

  Claudia had lied. Most of the people had not died from her poisoning but had fled, leaving her to her madness. The villagers were steadily returning to their homes; most had not gone far. Elfrieda, in fact, had been the first to arrive at the castle, searching out Avalon to reveal the rest of the tale.

  Lady Claudia had been descending slowly into her strange state, prone to fits after her husband died, frightening the serfs. When the new baron arrived, Elfrieda reported, no one had wanted to come to the castle. It had been cursed, it was said, and the woman was a danger to them all. No one even saw the new baron after the second week following the death of his brother. By then Claudia had ordered almost everyone from the castle, from gentry to serfs. That was nine days ago.

  Today, Avalon supposed, Claudia would be well into the first day of her journey to London, accompanied by a contingent of soldiers. She had not spoken a coherent word since Avalon opened the battered door to the baron’s chamber, only now and again weeping of fire and devils, strange nonsense that sealed the truth of her madness in the eyes of everyone as surely as anything. Like the wicked faerie, Avalon supposed, Claudia was now locked in her punishment. But instead of sinking away into the stone of a mountain, Claudia would stay in a tower of stone in London, a lifelong ending to her crimes.

  Someday, probably soon, Avalon would have to follow her to that city and give her own account to the king, a careful screening of the events that had taken place in the baron’s chamber. There were many witnesses, thank goodness, who would verify Avalon’s story and Claudia’s madness. But there was time enough to think about that in the future.

  Today was bright and fair, warmer here than in Scotland, and her mother’s garden had not yet fully succumbed to the seasonal slumber that was on its way. Stubborn leaves of red and orange and gold clung to branches, echoes of autumn.

  Today her husband slept, lost in the woven softness of blankets on a feather bed, looking somehow exactly in place in her old room, she thought. Avalon had chosen that one for him because it was clean, first of all, and also because she didn’t want to linger in the bleakness of the main chamber, even after Warner’s body had been removed, and the whole room had been scrubbed and brightened.

  So she had placed her husband in the room where she used to live. There in that corner chamber, with its fine views of the giant birch and the backdrop of piney forest. It was there that she had played, and there that she had dreamed, and there that her life had been happiest. Until she met Marcus.

  Perhaps tomorrow she would take him down to see that old birch. Perhaps she would steal a kiss while underneath its great branches.

  She had been idly walking down the white stone path, seeking the hidden marble bench she had not had the chance to see the last time she was in this garden. And yet when she found it, somehow she was not surprised to see the man who was supposed to be sleeping sitting there, waiting for her, wrapped in his tartan and a cape, watching her approach with bright eyes.

  “Sweet Rosalind,” he greeted her. “You are even more lovely than when I found you here last.”

  “You shouldn’t be out yet,” she chided, but her heart wasn’t in it, and he knew it.

  “Come over here and I’ll show you how feeble I am,” Marcus invited, teasing.

  She smiled at him, stopping just short of where he rested on the bench.

  “How do you feel?” she asked.

  “I feel as if I could sleep a thousand years.”

  “Really? Where have I heard that before?”

  “Now you’re supposed to tell me I’ve slept enough already, and it’s time for more interesting pastimes. I have one in mind, in fact.”

  The cave of honeysuckle surrounding the bench was on this day more of a weaving of golden brown twigs, buried tight among themselves, framing him in dramatic lines. Avalon leaned forward to touch his cheek with her fingertips. He caught her hand there with his own, dragged her fingers down to his lips, his breath warm and welcome.

  “Avalon.” He made her name a caress, sending that enraptured thrill streaming up her hand, into her heart. “Sometime soon, truelove, we are going to have to find the day when both of us are uninjured at the same time.”

  “That would be nice.”

  “Nicer than nice,” he growled, low and wanting, and began to pull her closer to him, down to him, his intent as clear as the blue of his eyes.

  Avalon pulled away, shaking her head, smiling again, though
it wasn’t easy, and she would rather have allowed him his way. But there was something she needed to say to him, and this was the first peace they had had between them, she thought, since the nightmare ended. Now seemed fitting enough, in this garden, underneath the clean sky.

  “We must talk,” she said, gently pulling back her hand.

  “Later.” His look was shining warmth.

  She gave a little laugh now, fighting the urge to let him win. “You’re not well enough, my lord. And I care for you too much to sap your strength.”

  He hesitated, finding her emphasis as she knew he would.

  “Do you?” he asked, brilliant and aware, focused only on her. “Care for me?”

  She looked down to the pebbled ground, at her clasped hands. It was so difficult for her to say this, even now.

  “I’ve been afraid,” she said to her hands. “I didn’t even know how much, until we came here. I’ve spent so much time fighting fear that I didn’t even realize how tightly it held me, how deeply it ran in me. I was a puppet to it, you could say, blind and hapless and controlled.”

  “Truelove—” he began, but she wouldn’t let him finish.

  “No, please, listen to me now.” She managed to meet his eyes again, and again felt the flooding gratitude that she could do this, that she could be here and talk to him, her dark angel, this glorious man.

  “It was fear that kept me locked out of my own heart, Marcus Kincardine. It was fear that kept me alone and always fighting, always struggling against all that I didn’t understand. I am ashamed of that. I wish it were untrue, but it is so, and I am ashamed.”

  He said nothing, but took her hand again and began to pull her down to the bench, and this time she let him, settling beside him underneath the cave of honeysuckle vines before continuing, speaking softly.

  “Because of my fear I almost lost you forever. You almost died for it. I didn’t tell you that I had tried to do what you asked of me, back at Sauveur. I tried to see something of the story of Keith MacFarland. But what I saw made no sense to me, and so I told myself it had been nothing but imagination, my own morbid fancy. But it had been a premonition, I suppose. For as soon as we came to that chamber with Claudia, I was caught in it again, and I had to act out my part in it again, and nothing I could do would change it.”

  The tail of a breeze came and danced past their feet, swirling the leaves in frolicking circles. The branches of the cherry tree nearby caught the motion and stretched up to sway amid the blue of the sky.

  “If I had only told you,” Avalon said, anguished. “If I had not been so afraid, if I could have trusted my own eyes—if I had only recognized this thing in me for what it was, all of this might have been avoided.”

  “Tell me, then,” he said, after a pause. “What is this thing in you that you speak of?”

  “Your curse,” she replied. “Your legend. You were right. I should have listened to you.” She sighed. “It’s been with me all along. I hid from it, I denied it. Yet it lives, and it always has.”

  Avalon turned her head away and then back to him, his dear face, sober and attentive. “It is me,” she said. “It’s always been me. I understand that now.”

  He changed suddenly, a blazing smile, quick and glad. “Your gift.”

  “Yes, my gift.” And as she repeated his word, his own gladness began to bloom in her, lifting her, giving her the courage to meet his gaze. “I realized in that room that it was what you said. A gift, not a curse. And it was real. I finally realized that. It was so close to being too late.”

  Marcus leaned his head back, took in the vines and bits of sky peeping through, and she could see he was searching for something to say to her, to ease her.

  “All my life,” he said, “I fought to banish my childhood. I fought to understand the forces of the world that were so beyond me. The lust for killing in men. The thirst for power in those who had plenty of it already. I tried to make sense of the senseless, because I needed that. I thought I needed to have logic at my back, and that way I could make my way through the wars and the battles and the injustices. But that never happened. I never grasped the answers to my questions, and I think I finally came to realize that I never would.

  “There are so many things beyond us, Avalon. There are so many outside things that shape us, that make us who we are and form the world. I think I know what your childhood must have been like with Hanoch. I think I can understand that, at least. And so I can understand how much you wanted to deny him in whatever way you could. I did, as well. I stayed away from my home for years, just to deny him. Perhaps it was wrong of me, I don’t know.”

  He seemed to lose the thread of his thoughts for a moment, gone far from her and this little garden—deserts, sand, golden sun—but then he came back.

  “You should never feel sorry for reacting to what happened to you, what he did to you. You should never apologize for wanting to deny the legend. It was your right to do so, by God, and even more. Had I been you, I would never have had your wisdom, I’m sure of that. Yet you blossomed and grew, Avalon, despite this harshness, and you have become the most wondrous person I have ever known, gift or not.”

  She tilted her head, studying him, finding nothing but seriousness on his face, no jesting, just this almost painfully raw speech, now more ardent with conviction.

  “And no one can say what would have happened even if you had told me of your vision,” he went on. “We all knew it was a trap when we got the missive. Yet we came.”

  “But I should have stopped it,” Avalon whispered, awash in the shame again.

  “How? How could you, truelove? If this was what was meant to be, then it would have happened anyway. I see this as another gift, in fact. Look here. My wife is alive, I am alive, and at last an injustice long endured has been righted. It seems to me that everything has become right and good, all around.”

  The sense of his words drifted through her, calm and peaceful, a balm. He had reached through his own pain and doubts to embrace her own, to comfort her, to shield her with bare truths that she might be too lost to see by herself. To Avalon, Marcus was the true gift, the greatest gift ever, and she could not keep it to herself another second.

  Though it might have been a miracle, she had managed to find her heart of hearts after all, and in it dwelled the noble grace of Marcus.

  “I love you,” she said. “I have for a long time. But now I can say it to you. I love you.”

  He reached out and pulled her closer to him, his hand strong and steady, revealing no weakness at all despite the sling and the bandages. She let him because, selfishly, she craved his touch, and if this was his only method of reassurance after her brazen admission, then she would take it and be happy.

  But he was not done with her; he drew her closer yet, until her legs were curled under her and her head was somewhere near his neck, and she was trying without much success to avoid his injured shoulder.

  “Be still,” he laughed. “You’ll break my stitches and bleed me to death, and all your pretty words will be for nothing.”

  Dismayed, she sunk into place, unmoving, and Marcus let out a sort of satisfied sigh and kissed her forehead.

  “That’s better,” he said. “I must remember to threaten you with my own demise again to make you do my bidding.”

  “You would joke,” she said hotly, but he lifted her face and claimed her lips before she could finish her thought, and then it melted away under his sweetness and all he left her with was a slow burn for more.

  “My beautiful Avalon, my warrior bride, would I dare joke with you? Well, perhaps a little,” he admitted, not letting her reply. “But now I have something very serious to say. I was awake in the baron’s chamber, even after I’d been shot. I haven’t told you that yet because I wasn’t sure how you would react. But I saw it all. It was hazy at first, yes, but even a man shot twice could not have missed that fire, my love, nor those men.”

  She stirred and he held her still against him, brushing her forehea
d again with his lips, stroking her hair.

  “It was terrifying,” he continued. “I would have been shaking, if I but had the strength. And I knew even then the source of it. I knew what you were doing, and why. I was proud of you. I was … in awe of you.”

  “No.…”

  “Yes. But you must understand, Avalon, that even during all of that, not once was I afraid of you. I told you before, truelove, I know your heart is good. It’s so clear to me. You are a blessing, kind and clever and compassionate. And if you don’t know that, I’m going to spend every day of the rest of my life trying to prove it to you.”

  Her tongue was tied in knots, and the annoying tears were back in her eyes, but it was worth it, worth it all to be here with him, so close and strong, so steady in his faith in her. Yet she pulled back to look at him, frowning just a little. A ribbon of sunlight fell across his face, became lost in the ebony of his hair.

  “But do you think,” she began. “That is—well, I told you that …” She let her voice fade away, too embarrassed to ask what she wanted to know, too needy to let it drop completely. She needed the words after all, after everything. They mattered.

  He studied her again, blue eyes to match the peaceful sky, then his face cleared, became something close to joyful.

  “My legendary Avalon. I’ve relied on that story so much, hoping, praying for you. Do you truly not know my deepest heart? If you did, you would know how much I love you. But I’ll say it anyway, even though I feel like I’ve been shouting it out to you forever. I love you. I love you more than life, more than myth, more than anything I could ever dream of. You are the answer to every wish I’ve ever had. I give thanks to God or to destiny, or to a curse or to men—whatever it was that led me here to you, and you to me.”

  Marcus leaned into her and Avalon met him there, their lips so close, their souls in matched harmony.

  “I love you,” he murmured. “I will always love you. I’ll say it to you forever.”

  I love you, Avalon, I love you.…

  I love you, truelove.