He did not take the passages that would bring us to the front entrance again, though that was the quickest route to the farms; instead he wove through the house with me, dealing swiftly and evasively with people we encountered who wanted to ask him questions or tell him something. At last we came to the door that led to the old courtyard, which had once been the only entrance to the maze. It had also been the only way inside the walls to get to the farms when I had first lived there but these days the maze was seldom used, for compared to newer paths, it was slow and circuitous. As we entered its green passages, I opened my mouth to ask why we had not gone a quicker way, but Rushton closed the gate behind us and pulled me unceremoniously into his arms to kiss me thoroughly and at length.
He did not let me go until I was breathless and his green eyes danced with a mixture of ire and passion as he said huskily, ‘I warn you that if you look at me again as you did when you came out the front doors of Obernewtyn, I will not wait until we have some privacy to do what your eyes invite.’
I felt my cheeks flush, but the same mad glee that had earlier filled me with a desire to laugh aloud snaked through me. I said with mock indignation, ‘I did not expect to see you or I would have guarded myself better.’
He smiled again and kissed me more gently, and after a little we went on, he keeping his hand about my waist. The smell of the greenthorn was nowhere near as strong as on summer days when the sun shone down on it, but the wind was stirring the topmost branches so that they gave off a whispering sound.
I asked Rushton what errand he had on the farms that was so urgent and he said, ‘Grufyyd has been experimenting with ways to preserve lemons in pottery crocks of oil. He just mentioned to me that he has a store of them laid up that would serve us well on the Red Land expedition,’ Rushton said. ‘We are going to inspect them.’
I stared at him. ‘Urgent lemons?’
He gave me a simmering look. ‘I daresay it is irresponsible of me to drag you away from your work on such a slight pretext, Guildmistress, but I have barely seen you since my return. Do you mind?’
I shook my head and waited, but all at once he seemed to sink into his own thoughts. Finally, I said, ‘I only wish Dameon had come with Kella and Darius.’
He nodded soberly. ‘I wish it too, but I am certain he will be here by the time the moon fair begins, and if anyone can bring Dragon home, it is him. In the meantime, maybe Kella and Darius will find a way to save the twins.’
‘I do not think there will be any saving Angina,’ I said, my heart heavy at the thought of the unconscious empath.
‘Still, we must not give up on him,’ Rushton answered. He grimaced and looked up. ‘Curse it! I felt a spot of rain just now. I am sorry, this expedition was ill timed.’
‘I do not care about getting wet,’ I said, but I looked up and saw that the sky was now completely clouded over. A moment later it began to rain in earnest.
Because the wind was blowing the rain sideways, the greenthorn offered some shelter, nevertheless I was wet through by the time we burst through the farm gate. The rain was now falling hard enough to hang a grey curtain between us and the main farm building and orchards and I could hear the sound of thunder rumbling. We ran hand in hand across the open stretch of grass past two storage sheds and then Rushton pulled me up the little winding trail that led to Louis Larkin’s hut, which stood a little apart from the other farm buildings. Even as he dragged open the door, a flash of lightning cast a brief, blue light into the room and I heard a crack of thunder. Rushton propelled me inside and hauled the door shut after us. It was very thick and the hut had walls of wood that muffled the noise of the storm, but the roof shingles were thin and the sound of the rain hammering down on them was deafening. It was dark inside with the door closed and Rushton went to pull open the shutters. The light that came in through the small panes was a thin and watery grey but even as he found a lantern and tinder, I noticed a faint reddish glow in the hearth.
I went to investigate and found the fireplace emanated warmth still. Louis had obviously raked out the coals in anticipation of his journey to Enoch’s farm; but there were two glowing nuggets that could be used to kindle another fire. Rushton found some kindling in a cupboard and there were a few split logs piled beside the hearth, so that in a remarkably short time a fire was crackling away merrily. Outside the storm raged overhead, making conversation impossible, but I was very glad of the warmth, for I was now shivering with cold.
Rushton vanished into the small second room in the hut and returned with an armful of clothes. I remembered then that Louis used to keep a trunk of spare clothes for any of his friends who might need to shed their orphan attire for a time. Rushton was familiar with the hut and the clothes because not only had he attended many a secret meeting here before he had claimed Obernewtyn as his own, he had also lived with Louis for a time when he had first come to Obernewtyn, before he had become overseer and had shifted into the big house.
‘Lucky the old man never throws anything away,’ Rushton shouted, kneeling to pick through the pile of clothes. Finding a shirt, he offered it to me, but I wrinkled my nose at the grubby thing and knelt to make my own search. I found a large relatively clean shawl that I decided I could use to wrap around myself while I dried my outer clothes. I shed my dripping coat and quilted vest, hanging them from the mantelshelf, and then dragged off my sodden boots, setting them on the hearth. My stockings were still dry, as was my shirt, for they had been protected by my new coat and my vest, but my trews were soaked below the coat. Draping the shawl around my shoulders, I removed my trews and shirt, wrung them out and hung them with the wettest parts to the fire. As I did so, I spared a thought for Cinda and Sarn and the others who were even now travelling through the storm.
I turned back to ask Rushton how long he thought it would take for the worst of the storm to ease, and found him stripping off his own shirt. The sight of his scarred and muscular back made my mouth go dry, for it made me think of the hurt Ariel had done to him, but it also reminded me of his caresses the previous morning in my bedchamber.
Only now did the unexpected intimacy of our situation strike me. I turned and busied myself filling a pot with water from a jug on a sideboard, my heart hammering with something that felt very close to fear. I suspended the pot on a hooked arm and swung it over the flames as Rushton knelt on the hearth to stuff our boots with rags.
I went to investigate the cupboards and found a few herbs that would do to make a warm drink. As I returned to the fire to wait for the water to boil, I realised I was shivering slightly but less from the cold, it seemed to me, than from the knowledge that we were utterly alone and no one had any idea where we were, or expected us to be anywhere. Grufyyd would simply assume that Rushton had decided not to come when the storm broke, and no one would be able to coerce or farseek to find us.
‘I sat here so many nights, wondering why my mother had sent me,’ Rushton said musingly and I looked over to see that he had pulled on a rumpled blue shirt and was sitting cross-legged on a tattered rug staring into the fire. He had the half-mesmerised look that flames always seem to evoke, and the knot of nervous excitement and apprehension loosened in me as I came to sit beside him.
‘You sound as if you remember those days well,’ I said, intrigued because he had never had much time for the past.
‘I suppose it is being in Louis’s place,’ he said dreamily. ‘I spent my first night at Obernewtyn here. I remember it so vividly. I entered by the farm gate because the gypsy had told me that was where you went if you were not invited by the master and were seeking work. Louis Larkin was the first person I saw and he took one look at me and said he could get me work if that was what I wanted. Of course I didn’t know what I wanted, for I had no idea why my mother had sent me here, but the little money she had left me had gone and it made sense to earn a bit and pay for my keep while I tried to puzzle it out. Louis said I could sleep on a cot in his hut for the time being, and he brought me here. He was kind to
me but he near drove me mad with his hints and mysterious glances. To this day I still don’t know why he could not simply say that my face resembled my father’s and my great-grandfather’s, and he had guessed I was the by-blow of one of them. Pure natural contrariness, I suppose.’
‘A gypsy told you to go in the farm gate?’ I asked curiously.
He nodded. ‘I had travelled some of the way with a small Twentyfamilies troupe. I had not begged a lift, for although my family had never looked down on them as others had, I knew gypsies had little to do with outsiders. It was a bracelet that my grandmother had given me, supposedly given to her grandmother by a Twentyfamilies gypsy, that caught the eye of the troupe leader. He offered me a meal and asked where I was bound. In the end he gave me a lift up to Guanette. It was not long after that I became involved with Henry Druid, so it was a good while before I came to the high mountains, but I remembered what the gypsy had said of the two gates.’ He smiled at me.
We sat awhile in companionable silence, listening to the fire crackling and to the storm outside, then I said, ‘Do you remember you sent me here after you helped me to get away from the house when I was trying to escape? Domick was here with Roland and they were waiting for Louis so they could have some sort of subversive meeting I suppose. They locked me in that back room.’
Rushton did not answer and when I looked at him, I realised he was not listening. He was staring down at the pile of clothes with a strange look on his face. He reached out and drew a crumpled shift of thin yellow cloth towards him. ‘This was Selmar’s,’ he said, looking shaken to the core.
I had once seen him cradling the half-demented Misfit girl in his arms. He had shouted at me, believing I had done something to bring on Selmar’s fit, but it had been Alexi’s experiments that had destroyed her mind. Louis Larkin told me once that she had been the hope of Obernewtyn. But that was before my time. In the end she had escaped with two Norselanders only to be caught and killed by Ariel’s maddened trained wolves.
‘You loved her,’ I said softly.
Rushton lifted his eyes from the grubby yellow dress, his face full of grief. ‘I loved the brightness of her spirit and her dream of a place where Misfits need not live in fear. I did not know then that I was a Misfit, even if only a poor sort of one, but I was a loner and an outsider and had lived in fear because my mother worked forbidden herb lore and I had no idea who my father was, so it seemed to me there was little difference between us. Selmar was the first to reveal her Talents to me, and others did so because of her. Eventually I pledged myself to their cause even as they pledged to mine. Between us, we thought to make Obernewtyn a place where outsiders and Misfits could dwell in peace with no need to hide what they were.’
‘And so you did,’ I said, looking sideways at him, but he was lost in his memories.
‘I think all of us were half in love with her,’ he said. ‘She had a quicksilver tongue that could make you believe black was white if she wanted to argue it that way and she was always laughing.’ He laughed, but sadly. ‘Roland, Domick, even Gevan adored her, and to old Louis, she was the daughter he had never had.’ He heaved a sigh and the grief and regret began to fade from his face. Then he looked at me. ‘It was only after I met you that I understood what I had felt for Selmar was many things, but not love.’ He laid the yellow dress gently aside and put his hands on my shoulders. This time the kiss he gave me was not rough and ravenous as it had been in the maze, but slow and tender. It made me dizzy and set me to burning. Then he began to unplait my wet hair and comb it out with his fingers.
‘Grufyyd will wonder where you are …’ I stammered.
‘He does not know I was coming to see him,’ he muttered and then his hands grew still and he looked into my eyes and said, ‘I meant to bring you here, now, Elspeth, to make love to you. The rain was an unexpected accomplice. You know that I want you and you have said you want me, but if you have changed your mind or you do not want this now, then you must tell me so.’
I looked into his face and seeing love and desire so naked there, all the tight, anxious doubts that had bubbled up in me dissolved. ‘I do not want you to stop,’ I told him, and let the shawl fall away, for I had no need of it any more.
He was very beautiful when he shed his clothes and came to me, smooth in places and scarred in others, strong in body but with a face that showed the marks of time and hurt. I had seen him unclothed when we had swum in the hot springs, but there had always been a barrier in my mind. Now, there was none. I looked at him and when he looked at me as he took off my underclothes, his gaze was no less ardent than my own. But even at the last moment, he caught my face in his hands and looked searchingly into my eyes. I could find no words to reassure him. I reached out and ran my fingertips across the soft hairs on his chest.
He gasped and pulled me down onto the shawl. For a moment, I felt the full weight of his body against mine, the hard flagstones under me, his arm warm under my neck.
I will have this night, I thought fiercely.
He spoke then, his mouth so close that he stole my breath for his words. ‘I feel as if you will always be slipping away from me, Elspeth,’ he whispered. ‘Even now.’
His words stilled the leaping flame at my core. ‘Soon you will know everything of me and in me,’ I promised him.
In the dim fire glow, his eyes were very dark and I saw myself in them, all pale rosy flesh, my hair spread out in wet skeins against the shawl and his arm. He ran his hand the length of my body and as he touched me and I him, it seemed to me that our flesh truly merged so that there were not his lips or mine, nor my body and his, but one pair of lips, one body. Long he dwelt upon me and often he drew back to look at my face and into my eyes. Then at last he entered me and in that moment of swift pain and flowering ecstasy, I took him into my mind.
There was a long, sweet dizzy falling, when his life spun about me in pieces, flashing and flying too fast and numerous for me to catch hold of more than vivid snatches. I saw a pretty brown-haired woman with Rushton’s jade eyes and yellow flowers in her hair singing in the forest, and then the same woman, cooking, cleaning, weeping, scolding a jack who had sold her a shoddy pot, chopping herbs and, finally, gaunt with sickness and lying in a bed, begging Rushton to go to the high mountains, to Obernewtyn.
‘I do not know why it matters, Mother, but if you wish it, so it will be,’ Rushton told her, his voice less deep than I had ever heard, and breaking so that his boy’s voice showed through. His reflection in his mother’s eyes was very young.
I saw Obernewtyn as he had seen it the first time, half swathed in mist and darkness, and no less drear and sinister than it had seemed to me the first time I had seen it. He had known no more than I how beloved it would become when he hoisted the pack higher and wondered aloud why on earth his mother’s dying wish had been for him to come to such a wretched place.
Then he was older and stronger and I saw him laughing with Louis Larkin and then swearing a solemn pact in this very hut with Roland, Gevan, Selmar and Domick. How young they all looked and how radiant with hope and determination. Then he was older and sitting at a campfire with Selmar, her face all quick brightness and laughter.
With a shock, I saw myself as he had first seen me on the farm, a pale, long-boned girl with a thick fall of black hair and dark green eyes, narrowed and wary under arched black brows. What had there been in my face and form that had struck such a deep and instant chord in him? His mind did not know and yet I felt the impact of that first meeting shudder through him and remembered that I had felt the same, though I had read my reaction as fear.
Suddenly I was enveloped by the memory of despair so black and choking and bottomless that I was afraid. I saw my face at the core of it and the strange purple and orange of a sky with a firestorm in it. This was how Rushton had felt when he had believed me dead after the fire in the White Valley that had killed Jik. The memory was replaced by another, in which I felt Rushton’s incredulous delight when I first told him that I lov
ed him, following the Battlegames in Sador. I relived that first sweet kiss and saw the tiny seed of doubt planted in his mind by my evasions and the thin explanations I had offered of my long absence after the fire in the White Valley. I saw how the way my body healed itself and the things the futuretellers said or did not say about me had fed his doubt, confirming in his deepest consciousness that there was much about me that I had not revealed, despite my avowed love for him.
I saw a conversation between him and Alad about the way beasts called me Innle and greeted me with reverence and another conversation with Roland concerning the way my body healed, both of them wondering if it could be another kind of Talent that I alone possessed.
I experienced again with guilty anguish the torment Rushton had endured at the hands of Domick’s vile alter ego, Mika, when he had been Ariel’s captive. The doubts I had planted earlier had given the defective Misfit a tool with which to wound and manipulate Rushton. I watched, sickened at how, under Ariel’s malevolent influence, the seed of doubt had flourished. Just when my own guilt and despair were unbearable, I saw his memory of me, standing in the glass cell in the Beforetime complex on Norseland, trying to show him how to open it. I saw how understanding penetrated the fog of rage in his mind, even as he opened the door with eager hatred. Instead of cowering back as he had dimly expected me to do, I stepped toward him making no attempt to protect myself from the storm of terror and loathing that had made him nearly batter himself senseless against the glass trying to get at me.
Once again, I watched the battle that raged in him, but this time from the inside of his mind. I saw my own fear and determination writ clear in my expression and his dawning and incredulous realisation that I was offering myself to his murderous desire to kill me. I felt his love for me rising up in an unstoppable wave that swamped the simple potency of that intent.
And then I saw myself smeared with his blood, staring down at him; saw the naked anguish and love in my face.
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