Tempted by Ruin (Sons of Britain Book 4)

by Mia West

  “Yes.”

  “Tell him we came for him. Make sure he knows that. Tell him I came back.”

  “I’ll do it.”

  “Wait, he left his dog. I’ll fetch her—”

  The man gripped his arms. “He meant to. You must go.”

  The dock thumped hollowly under his boots as he walked back to the boat. He took his place on a rowing bench, numb. The captain issued quiet orders, and they pulled away from the dock.

  Against his will, his eyes sought the abandoned roost Gawain had shown him. It looked unremarkable from the water, different only because it stood slightly higher than the rest of the structure. Nothing about it hinted at the extraordinary man who’d shared it.

  But he was unable to look away and watched it as he rowed, until distance and sea mist took it from him.

  ~

  “Lot’s dead.”

  In his empty state, it took Palahmed a moment to remember to nod.

  Rhys glanced at Bedwyr, then Arthur, then back to him. “By your hand.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re certain he’s dead?”

  Cold gray water, muddied by a cloud of blood, billowing wide.

  “He’s dead,” Arthur said. “The dock-keeper at the stronghold confirmed it when we went back.”

  Rhys’s gaze dipped to the pup in the crook of Palahmed’s arm. “Can’t help but notice—”

  “If that’s all,” Palahmed said, “may I take my leave?”

  A long silence, but for the ever-present pounding of the sea in his ears. Even in Rhys’s council chamber, it continued to harass him.

  “I had an interesting chat with Morgawse,” Bedwyr said, “and Arthur with Agravain. We can fill you in.”

  As soon as Rhys uttered, “All right,” Palahmed made for the door.

  The hall had more people in it now. The season was turning full into spring in the river lands, bringing more ships into port. The approach to campaign was drawing men as well. It occurred to him, halfway across the great room, that the noise there might drown the surf sounds that wouldn’t leave him be. But the thought of being around other people…

  No, he needed out. Away. Some isolated place he could crumble apart like so much wet sand.

  He passed through the bustling hall and out the doorway. Skirted the brothel and its insistent proofs of life, and set out on a path he hadn’t walked in some time. Through the gate at the wall of the settlement, over a couple of rolling meadows, down through a broad ring of dusk-gathering mist. He waded through the ethereal lake of it to the small mound in the center and its sturdy little chapel.

  The stone felt warm against his back when he settled on the grass. He found to his surprise that the hand not cradling the pup held a rind of soft cheese. He’d picked it up unconsciously on his way through the hall. When he offered it to her, the pup began to lick at it, so he set them both on the tufty grass and then closed his eyes.

  A low whistle brought them open again sometime later, hope leaping up his throat nearly to strangle him. The sky had darkened a bit more, revealing only the dimmest shape of a man’s shoulders approaching through the ground mist. Too tall, his mind said, and he hated it because it was right. As the form became more familiar, he tried to feel grateful, but just now he felt very little.

  Safir sat down next to him and sighed. “Brother.”

  “You’re back.”

  “You’re back.”

  As they sat in the damp twilight, he wondered how he’d be able to recount what had happened. Safir wouldn’t be put off as easily as Rhys. Where Rhys might have simply demanded answers, Safir would wait him out, perhaps prod his ribs until he spoke or attempt to wrestle it from him. Such were brothers.

  But it seemed as if a year had passed since Palahmed had seen him, instead of a couple of months. In his core it felt as if much more time had passed, as much as it had changed him. The sort of time it took stone to form, to find its true grain and texture and shade, and then to wear away under forces more relentless than itself.

  “What happened?” Safir asked softly.

  “Lot tried to kill Gawain, so I killed Lot.”

  Succinct. Factual. But not the entire truth.

  Safir waited, damn him.

  “We got Gawain away, but he left in the night and went back.”

  “Without word?”

  He couldn’t bring himself to confirm it.

  “Palahmed.” Safir laid a hand on his chest. It felt like an anchor. “I’m sorry.” He was quiet for several heartbeats, maybe longer. Then, “Perhaps he had unfinished business.”

  Perhaps he’d decided he belonged in the north after all. That he truly was still part of the greater story of his people. Palahmed wanted to cut out his own tongue for telling him so.

  “Who is this?” Safir reached for the cheese, and the pup followed until she stood before him.

  “His dog.”

  He could feel Safir looking at him but couldn’t bear to meet his eye. “Does he have a name?”

  “She. No.”

  Safir picked her up and cooed to her. In her turn, the pup licked his nose.

  “You should take her.”

  Safir made kissing noises at the hound. “Hello, pretty girl. And why would I do that?”

  “I’m not fit to keep her. Not fit…” For anything.

  “Come. You know me. I live coin to coin, and bed to bed. Not about to change now.”

  The words sliced deep. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “Why not, brother? It was only the truth.”

  “It was petty and hurtful. And not true.”

  “She needs a name.”

  His mind stumbled on the turn. “She’s not mine to name.”

  Safir set the pup on the ground. She sat on her small, wrinkly rump and looked at them. Her tail thumped once, twice, and she huffed in her gruff way. Then she climbed into Palahmed’s lap.

  He broke.

  Safir’s arms came around him, strong and warm, and he sank into them. The harsh, grating noises coming from his own chest were too ragged for a spring evening, but he couldn’t hold them inside any more than he could raise the sun from beyond the mountains. In his ear, Safir was making the sorts of sounds one might use to soothe a babe, and was rocking Palahmed against him. He’d have liked to pull away, but he couldn’t do that either. So he spilled it all, in a torrent of words and wails until he was empty.

  He became aware, some moments later, of the taste of wet wool. He closed his mouth, resting against the rise and fall of Safir’s chest.

  “Breathe,” Safir murmured.

  “I can’t.” God, he sounded miserable.

  Safir smoothed his hair. “You must. You’ve a young lady depending on you now.”

  The pup was watching him, curious, intent. As soon as he met her eye, she nosed his elbow. He straightened away from Safir, the wall of the chapel cool at his back now. Picking up the dog, he settled her against his belly and stroked her neck. He hadn’t the first clue what to name her.

  “It’ll come, in its time,” Safir said.

  Had he said it aloud? Or was Safir reading minds now? “That sounds wise. Pick it up in Hibernia?”

  The silence beside him was thick and telling.

  Fuck. He rolled his head to look at Safir. “You didn’t go to Hibernia, did you?”

  His brother bit his lip, then shook his head.

  “You just made yourself scarce so I would accompany him.”

  “Do you hate me?”

  Hate him? Of all the ridiculous notions. “Did you have a wager, too?”

  Even in the dimming light, he could see Safir’s eyes widen. “How did you know there was a wager?”

  “I didn’t, until just now. But there’s always a wager.” He rubbed a knuckle down the pup’s chest until he could feel the thrum behind her ribs. “Unfortunately, you’ve all wasted your bets.”

  Chapter 22

  Six moons later…

  Bedwyr looked at the man across th
e fire and felt weary.

  They all did, and for good reason. The spring and summer campaigns had kept them moving, kept them fighting, almost without interruption. He was proud, for they’d fought hard and held the border. Even reclaimed a bit of territory from the Saxons’ hold.

  He didn’t know how, but Palahmed had fought hardest of all. If Bedwyr hadn’t seen him bleed a few times, he’d have thought the man’s innards made of jointed ironworks, his mind a glowing fire pan, and the whole powered by a force none of them could make out. He made no sound in battle, just cut down the enemy, left, right, and center, until his blade ran out of quarry.

  He said little in the downtimes, too. Even Safir, who’d returned to fight at his side, seemed to have given up trying to draw him out. Palahmed followed orders—he was impeccable in that. But the only companionship he allowed was the pup’s.

  He’d trained her to stay in camp, and she waited for him there, lanky and faithful. Whenever they returned from a skirmish, he would walk directly to her and kneel, and set his forehead to hers. They would remain so for a long moment, each holding the other up as men moved around them, and then Palahmed would rise and lead her away on a solitary walk.

  They sat across the fire now, Palahmed staring into the flames, the pup with her head on his thigh. His thumb stroked her ear absently.

  Bedwyr looked at Arthur, seated beside him. They’d fought well, too, falling into their familiar rhythms. Some things had been different; they’d discovered a few new techniques for their combined efforts. Bedwyr had a healing scar on his side that itched to madden him. Arthur had taken a blade to the meat of his shoulder, but thanks to his quickness, had avoided a deep slice. They’d shielded each other for years now, but always they returned to the fire together. He wasn’t at all certain he could survive any other outcome.

  “Don’t leave me.”

  Arthur looked up, his dove-gray eyes pale in the firelight. “Never.”

  Unflinching, unhesitating. He had that to hold on to.

  He wished he could do the same for their mercenary friend.

  ~ ~ ~

  Gawain stared through the hole in the roof.

  Empty blackness. Might as well have been looking through his own middle.

  “Won’t see anything this time of year.”

  He looked away, embarrassed, and Agravain topped the steps. He didn’t wait for an invitation. Just sat down next to Gawain. As if he wanted him there.

  “Ah. I stand corrected. There’s the guide star.”

  “Am I needed somewhere?”

  “Why are you up here, Gawain? Thought you’d grown out of it. Or do you take hawk to heart? You’re not going to fling yourself off the roof, are you?”

  “Fuck off.”

  “I will when you do.”

  Gawain looked at him in surprise.

  “You should fly, brother.”

  Ignoring for the moment how it felt to hear Agravain call him that… “You want me to jump off the roof?”

  “Fly. South for the winter. Isn’t that what birds do?”

  He turned away. Picked at his ragged fingernails. “Nothing for me there.”

  “I told Arthur the same. But I wasn’t lying.”

  “I’m needed here.”

  “To do what? Collect Mother’s berries?”

  “Fuck—”

  “—off. Gawain. No one was more surprised than I was when you swam back. Well, except maybe for your shieldmate?”

  Gawain bit his tongue.

  “And it helped. The transition would’ve been more difficult without all four sons accounted for. But Mother’s well-seated now. Has been for some time.”

  “It doesn’t bother you?”

  “That it isn’t me?”

  He nodded.

  Agravain shook his head. “Don’t think I’m made to lead.”

  Gawain hadn’t dared ask it before now. Hadn’t been sure what Agravain’s response would be. Resentment, he would’ve guessed. But that was before he had spent the spring and summer working alongside him to help run the domain. He wasn’t the bully Gawain remembered.

  These days, he wasn’t even sure he ever had been. They’d all had their moments, that was certain. But now he could see many of those moments in a different light. What had seemed like Agravain rejecting him, keeping him out of the fighting corps, belittling him…in his own misguided way, Agravain may have been trying to protect him from Lot. The farther Gawain was from the man, the less likely he’d been to get hurt.

  Right down to his very first journey to Cymru. He’d always thought his mother had pushed Lot to fulfill his commitment to send his men to guard Rhys’s border, but it’d been Agravain who’d convinced him. And then insisted Gawain go with them. He’d met Arthur because of it, and Bedwyr.

  He’d met Palahmed.

  “Why didn’t you go with Arthur when he offered?”

  Agravain gave him a wry glance. “Why didn’t you?”

  He’d spent whole sleepless nights wondering the same. He moved about the stronghold numbly most days, as if he’d been scaled and gutted. As if half of him were missing.

  But when their boat had pulled away from the cove on those first hard tugs of the oars, he’d felt he was doing something wrong. Every league that stretched between him and the islands on that wet flight had pulled on his chest, as if one of his ribs had still been moored to the dock.

  Rising in the night…settling the pup in the sheltering curve of Palahmed’s body…those had hurt most of all, and his eyes had burned long before he’d reached the shore and dived into the surf to begin the cold, painful crawl back to the stronghold.

  He’d had to, though. He couldn’t explain it, and he didn’t want it to be true, but he’d felt compelled to return. Because this was his home.

  Or had been. He was beginning to think that wasn’t true after all.

  He took a deep breath, but it didn’t ease the tightness in his throat. “How would that look, though? Me, running off to Cymru?”

  “Like you’re on the right side.”

  “Of the war?”

  “Of yourself.”

  He looked at his fingernails again. Still ragged. “But what about the Orcait? What about defending them?”

  “Nobody wants these islands, Gawain. Where is your true work?”

  As keenly as he’d felt the tug back toward this place on that dark night at the tail of winter, he’d begun to feel a different pull. It had started in the spring, when he would normally have been making his first scouting forays along the Saxon border. It had gotten stronger as summer came on, brisk up here but no doubt warmer and dryer on the southern reaches where he’d spent every summer of the past seven. Some nights, he’d woken with the sensations of it all about him—the high, wide-bladed grass waving under a sun that seeped into his skin, the sounds of crickets and swordsong and dying men, the smell of ripening fruit and blood-soaked soil. The taste of sweat on a man’s neck.

  “Where is your shieldmate?”

  Not here.

  But maybe not there, either. Not for him.

  “I was a thorn in his arse.”

  Agravain laughed, but it didn’t sound like it used to. “I feel a certain comradeship with this Saracen fellow. Tell me to fuck off again, and I’ll heave you out that hole in the roof myself. Listen, you’re miserable for a reason, and for once, it isn’t my company.”

  “I’m sorry I never noticed.”

  “Noticed what?”

  “What you did for me.”

  “Don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Gawain looked at him, but Agravain was staring hard at the sky. They wouldn’t speak of it, his profile said.

  Well, tough knots. Gawain would have him know.

  “I’m grateful anyway.”

  His brother’s jaw tightened. “If I have to, I’ll lash you to a mast and tell the crew not to stop ’til they reach Rhys’s. Don’t fucking tempt me.”

  Gawain laughed, and Agravain scowled harder.
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  “Besides,” he said, “I need you there when Gareth and Gahers run off to join Arthur. They’ve got that look in their eyes.”

  “What look?”

  “Same one you got whenever you heard a tale of him. I’m surrounded by adventure hounds.”

  “That’s not why I wanted to seek out Arthur.”

  Agravain looked at him squarely, but for once he didn’t feel any shame.

  “I know it, brother. More reason to go.”

  Gawain gripped his knees. “What if I’m too late?” he asked, then added, “What if the fighting’s done?” even though it wasn’t what he was most worried about.

  Didn’t look like he’d fooled Agravain any more than himself. “You’ve fought to live who you are for two decades. You truly think that fight’s over?”

  No, he didn’t.

  “Seems like the sort of thing a man could use a shieldmate for.”

  “Wish you’d met him.”

  “Saw his handiwork. That was all the proof I needed.”

  “You don’t hate him for it? For killing Lot?”

  “No, but that’s not what I’m talking about. Gareth saw him revive you. You’d half-drowned. Maybe fully drowned, as dead as Gareth said you looked. Yet here you are. As far as I’m concerned, I owe this Saracen two debts.”

  Gawain bit down on the inside of his cheek until he tasted iron.

  “There’s a more pressing matter just now, though.”

  When he turned to Agravain, his brother sighed.

  “The man has your dog, Gawain. What if he’s given her some stupid name? How could you live with yourself?”

  Chapter 23

  The hall and brothel loomed larger as Palahmed approached.

  He could still veer off and spend the evening somewhere else. Somewhere less…evocative.

  He wouldn’t even have to go alone. Khalida would go with him. She followed him everywhere. She’d turned out to be a good, gentle dog. No wonder Lot hadn’t wanted her.

  “What do you think, Khalida? Can we bear it?”

  The dog looked up at him with her clear eyes. Her expression had an unmistakable air of reproof about it.