by Nora Roberts
She told me I was young to have it passed on to me, but she and my father had discussed it.
He'd agreed to let her do it, in her time and her own way. She wanted to give me the pendant before she left us."
"You didn't want it."
"No, by God, I didn't. I wanted her. I wanted things to be as they were. When she was well and I was nothing more than a lad running over the hills. I wanted her singing in the kitchen again, the way she did before she was ill."
Everything inside her ached for him, but when she reached out, Conal waved her off. "I shouted at her, and I ran from her. She called after me, and tried to come after me, but I was strong and healthy and she wasn't. Even when
I heard her weeping, I didn't look back. I went and hid in my uncle's boat shed. It wasn't till the next morning that my father found me.
"He didn't take a strap to me as I might have expected, or drag me home by the ear as I deserved. He just sat down beside me, pulled me against him, and told me my mother had died in the night."
His eyes were vivid as they met Allena's. She wondered that the force of them didn't burn away the tears that swam in her own. "I loved her. And my last words to her were the bitter jabs of an angry child."
"Do you think_oh, Conal, can you possibly believe those words are what she took with her?"
"I left her alone."
"And you still blame a frightened and confused twelve-year-old boy for that? Shame on you for your lack of compassion."
Her words jolted him. He rose as she did. "Years later, when I was a man, I did the same with my father."
"That's self-indulgent and untrue." Briskly, she stacked plates, carried them to the sink. It wasn't sympathy he needed, she realized. But plain, hard truth. "You told me yourself you didn't know he was ill. He didn't tell you."
She ran the water hot, poured detergent into it, stared hard at the rising foam. "You curse the idea you have_what did you call it_elfin blood but you sure as hell appear to enjoy the notion of playing
God."
If she'd thrown the skillet at his head he'd have been less shocked.
"That's easy for you to say, when you can walk away from all of this tomorrow."
"That's right, I can." She turned the faucet off and turned to him. "I can, finally, do whatever I want to do. I can thank you for that, for helping me see what I was letting happen, for showing me that I have something of value to give. And I want to give it, Conal. I want to make a home and a family and a life for someone who values me, who understands me and who loves me. I won't take less ever again. But you will. You're still hiding in the boat shed, only now you call it a studio."
Vile and hateful words rose up in his throat. But he was no longer a young boy, and he rejected them for the sharper blade of ice. "I've told you what you asked to know. I understand what you want, but you have no understanding of what I need."
He walked out, letting the door slap shut behind him.
"You're wrong," she said quietly. "I do understand."
She kept herself busy through the morning. If she did indeed go away the next day, she would leave something of herself behind. He wouldn't be allowed to forget her.
She hung the curtains she'd mended, pleased when the sunlight filtered through the lace into patterns on the floor. In the laundry room she found tools and brushes and everything she needed. With a kind of defiance she hauled it all outside. She was going to scrape and paint the damn shutters.
The work calmed her, and that malleable heart she'd spoken of began to ache.
Now and then she glanced over at the studio. He was in there, she knew. Where else would he be? Though part of her wanted to give up, to go to him, she did understand his needs.
He needed time.
"But it's running out," she murmured. Stepping back, she studied the results of her labors. The paint gleamed wet and blue, and behind the windows the lace fluttered in the breeze.
Now that it was done and there was nothing else, her body seemed to cave in on itself with fatigue. Nearly stumbling with it, she went into the house. She would lie down for a little while, catch up on the sleep she'd lost the night before.
Just an hour, she told herself and, stretching out on the bed, went under fast and deep.
Conal stepped back from his own work. His hands were smeared with clay to the wrists, and his eyes half blind with concentration.
Allena of the Faeries. She stood tall, slim, her head cocked slyly over one shoulder, her eyes long and her mouth bowed with secrets. She wasn't beautiful, nor was she meant to be. But how could anyone look away?
How could he?
Her wings were spread as if she would fly off at any moment. Or fold them again and stay, if you asked her.
He wouldn't ask her. Not when she was bound by something that was beyond both of them.
God, she'd infuriated him. He went to the sink, began to scrub his hands and arms. Snipping and sniping at him that way, telling him what he thought and felt. He had a mind of his own and he'd made it up. He'd done nothing but tell her the truth of that, of everything, from the beginning.
He wanted peace and quiet and his work. And his pride, he thought, as his hands dripped water. The pride that refused to accept that his path was already cut. In the end, would he be left with only that?
The emptiness stretched out before him, staggeringly deep. Were these, then, after all, his choices? All or nothing? Acceptance or loneliness?
Hands unsteady, he picked up a towel, drying off as he turned and studied the clay figure. "You already know, don't you? You knew from the first."
He tossed the towel aside, strode to the door. The light shifted, dimmed even as he yanked it open. Storm clouds crept in, already shadowing the sea.
He turned for the cottage, and what he saw stopped him in his tracks. She'd painted the shutters, was all he could think. The curtains she'd hung danced gaily in the rising wind. She'd hung a basket beside the door and filled it with flowers.
How was a man to resist such a woman?
How could it be a trap when she'd left everything, even herself, unlocked and unguarded?
All or nothing? Why should he live with nothing?
He strode toward the cottage and three steps from the door found the way barred to him. "No." Denial, and a lick of fear, roughened his voice as he shoved uselessly at the air. "Damn you! You'd keep me from her now?"
He called out to her, but her name was whisked away by the rising wind, and the first drops of rain pelted down.
"All right, then. So be it." Panting, he stepped back. "We'll see what comes at the end of the day."
So he went through the storm to the place that called to his blood.
She woke with a start, the sound of her own name in her ears. And woke in the dark.
"Conal?" Disoriented, she climbed out of bed, reached for the lamp. But no light beamed when she turned the switch. A storm, she thought blearily. It was storming. She needed to close the windows.
She fumbled for the candle, then her hand jerked and knocked it off the little table.
Dark? How could it be dark?
Time. What time was it? Frantically she searched for the candle, found a match.
Before she could light it, lightning flashed and she saw the dial of the little wind-up clock.
Eleven o'clock.
No! It was impossible. She'd slept away all but the last hour of the longest day.
"Conal?" She rushed out of the room, out of the house, into the wind. Rain drenched her as she ran to his studio, fought to open the door.
Gone. He was gone. Struggling against despair, she felt along the wall for the shelves, and on the shelves for the flashlight she'd seen there.
The thin beam made her sigh with relief, then her breath caught again at what stood in the line of that light.
Her own face, her own body, made fanciful with wings. Did he see her that way? Clever and confident and lovely?
"I feel that way. For the first time in my life
, I feel that way."
Slowly, she shut the light off, set it aside. She knew where he'd gone, and understood, somehow, that she was meant to find her own way there, as he had, in the dark.
The world went wild as she walked, as wild as the day she had come to this place. The ground shook, and the sky split, and the sea roared like a dragon.
Instead of fear, all she felt was the thrill of being part of it. This day wouldn't pass into night without her. Closing her hand over the star between her breasts, she followed the route that was clear as a map in her head.
Steep and rough was the path that cut through rock, and slippery with wet.
But she never hesitated, never faltered. The stones loomed above, giants dancing in the tempest. In its heart, the midsummer fire burned, bright and gold, despite the driving rain.
And facing it, the shadow that was a man.
Her heart, as she'd been told, knew.
"Conal."
He turned to her. His eyes were fierce as if whatever wild was in the night pranced in him as well. "Allena."
"No, I've something to say." She walked forward, unhurried though the air trembled. "There's always a choice, Conal, always another direction. Do you think I'd want you without your heart? Do you think I'd hold you with this?"
In a violent move she pulled the pendant from around her neck and threw it.
"No!" He grabbed for it, but the star only brushed his fingertips before it landed inside the circle. "Can you cast it off so easily? And me with it?"
"If I have to. I can go, make a life without you, and part of me will always grieve. Or I can stay, make a home with you, bear your children, and love you for everything you are. Those are my choices. You have yours."
She held out her arms. "There's nothing but me here to hold