by Unknown
She called his name, her whole body quivering with feeling as he gave one, final shuddering thrust of his hips, a cry escaping his lips as they both took one final, flying leap toward freedom, coming crashing down to earth together as one quaking mass of flesh. She cried. She couldn’t help the overwhelming emotion that overtook her body and she sobbed in his arms.
“I hurt ye, lass, och! I’m so sorry,” he whispered, kissing her wet cheeks again and again, and then she was laughing, because he had so misunderstood her feeling. They were tears of pure joy, not pain. She had never been in any less pain—at least, in her heart—as she was at that moment.
“No! No!” she protested, holding him fast.
“You are a dervish, woman,” Raife complained when he went to move from her but she clung to him, desperate to keep him with her, in her, forever. If they could just stay this way and lock the world out, life would be perfection, she reasoned.
“I am your dervish,” she whispered back, and he kissed her, claiming her mouth as his own, just as he had claimed the rest of her from the inside out.
“I did hurt ye.” Raife frowned when she finally let him climb off of her, looking down at the blood staining the lamb’s wool in the firelight.
“Nay, ye claimed me.” She touched his cheek. “Sometimes claiming what’s yours involves a little bloodshed. ’T’was worth it.”
“Listen to ye.” He grinned down at her as he stood and stretched, his body like carved bronze in the firelight. “Yer sounding more like a Scot every day.”
“When can we do it again?” She put her arms around him and climbed him like a tree.
“I have so much more to teach ye.” He laughed, kissing her fully on the mouth, holding her little body in his arms.
“More?” Her eyes lit up.
“Let’s go clean up.”
The hot spring was the purest of luxuries. She thought everyone in England would live in a mountain if they knew about hot springs. The water was warm without the need of a fire, like magic. Raife lit a torch on the wall as they went through a door in their room, deeper into the mountain, into a cavern.
“Are ye ready to be a wulver’s mate?” he called as she slipped into the warmth of the steaming water, moaning softly at the sensation.
“Isn’t that what we just did?” she teased, reaching for him, letting him lift her as he got in, too, buoyant.
“I am pack leader,” he reminded her, kissing the freckled on her shoulders. “There will be other responsibilities.”
“My mother tried to make me a good girl and learn all about how to run a household, but alas,” Sybil lamented. “I was better at shooting and riding.”
“Yer strengths are suited to our life here, lass.” Raife slid his hands over her under the water, following her curves. “It’s like ye were born to be here.”
“Maybe I was.” She cocked her head and looked at him. “Maybe it was God’s hand who guided me here after all. If God could curse us, mayhaps he could save us too.”
“Mayhaps.” He kissed her softly, the steam rising all around them. “Ye are a wonder, Sybil Blackthorne.”
“What will be my new name?” she wondered aloud.
“Yer new name?”
“Don’t I take your name, when we are married?”
“We do’na have written contracts here.” He smiled. “We’ll have a declaration and a marking. Followed by a giant feast. And then three days alone so I can ravish ye in every possible position...”
“I like the sound of that…” She sighed happily, tilting her head so he could kiss her throat.
“But ye will still be called Sybil Blackthorne,” he said, meeting her eyes in the dim light. “I do’na need a change of names to know ye are mine. Ye will forever be mine no matter what ye are called.”
She had cringed at the thought of becoming Sybil MacFalon, but she rather liked the idea of becoming Sybil…Wulver? Did the wulvers even have surnames? Blackthorne was her family name, associated with her father, whom she loved, but a mother who had given her to her uncle to do with as he wished. The name had been a mixed blessing her whole life.
Sybil’s head came up and she looked at her new mate and future husband through the rising steam, frowning, a thought suddenly occurring to her.
I never told him my full name.
Had she? She could have sworn she had not.
“Raife…?”
“Yes, lass?” He didn’t open his eyes. He looked so relaxed and content, floating with her in the water.
“How… how did you know my family name?”
The question hung between them. Raife slowly opened his eyes, meeting hers. She saw something flicker there before he answered, something that told her he wasn’t going to tell her the truth. Or maybe, not all of it.
“’Tis common knowledge the MacFalon was marrying a Blackthorne,” he said.
Mayhaps that was true. But she frowned and traced the lines between his brows with her fingers, realizing she’d come to know him far more than she had let on. She knew this man’s expressions, when he was being honest, and when he was not. Especially since the latter was so uncommon between them.
“You heard that, all the way up here, in the mountain?” She kissed his cheek, water beading there.
“It’s my job to know these things.” He raised his brows at her. “I can’na protect my pack without that knowledge. We’ve avoided war with the MacFalons for twenty years. That was my father’s legacy and I want it to live on.”
“The wolf pact.” She sighed, snuggling her head under his chin. “Everything is politics.”
“Not everything.” Raife’s hand moved to cup her breast and she smiled. But she wasn’t willing to let him distract her so easily. Like the wulvers, she had scented something, and she was going to follow it. She just wasn’t exactly sure where she was headed.
“Your father…?” she asked softly. “King Henry?”
She felt his spine straighten at her words.
“Who told ye about that?”
“Just… gossip…” She shrugged. “You’re not the only one who pays attention, you know.”
“’Tis true.” Raife sighed. “Although I would like to forget it more often than not.”
“But he created the wolf pact, didn’t he?”
“He did,” Raife agreed. “But it was for his own personal gain, ye ken? He wanted the MacFalons and the wulvers united against a common enemy.”
“King Edward IV.”
“Aye.” Raife’s mouth pursed into a thin line before he went on. “So the Tudors could sit on the throne again. He came here just after the Anglo-Saxon wars. We did’na care for the English and neither did the MacFalons, but fightin’ for Henry meant my father could gain some measure of peace in our pack. We could stop fightin’ the Scots and mayhaps go into the woods without fear of our women being hunted and killed… or raped.”
“Raped…” She shuddered, something suddenly occurring to her that hadn’t before. The wulver women had spoken of it as a romance, the relationship between King Henry VII and Raife’s mother. But now that she understood the bond between a wulver and his mate, she wasn’t so sure. “Your mother? And King Henry?”
“She did’na love the man,” he replied flatly. “She did’na much of a choice in the matter.”
That thought made Sybil shiver in spite of the heat of the water.
“And she became pregnant with you?” she murmured, thinking out loud. “But I thought wulvers shift when they’re in heat? Don’t they change into wolf form?”
“Aye, lass, they do.”
Sybil stared at him while he let that sink in.
Laina lamented not being able to be with Darrow in human form when she was in heat, at her most fervent. She would change with little warning, and be unable to change back until her moon blood cycle had passed. It happened to all the wulver females. If Raife’s mother, Avril, had become pregnant with him, that meant she had turned. And while she was in her wolf form, King Henry had�
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“No…” Sibyl’s eyes widened in shock. “He took her when she was… as a wolf?”
“Aye.” His jaw hardened, his eyes dark in the light of the lamp. “Some men see wulver women as a challenge.”
“Good God.” She closed her eyes against it. That poor woman, Sybil thought. She couldn’t imagine what she’d been through. She’d watched her friend give birth in a cage and then be murdered by the MacFalon, was taken prisoner herself, and then what? She’d been kept in a cage as a freak show, something to be shown off by the MacFalon when guests arrived? Guests like Henry Tudor, the possible future king of England?
“Did your father know? I mean… Darrow’s father…?”
“Garaith is my father. I think of him always that way,” Raife told her. “He treated me always as his son.”
“But he knew that you weren’t really his son?”
“Eventually, aye.” Raife’s face was pained. “But not when Henry made the pact. Not when he got the MacFalons and the wulvers to agree to fight for him.”
“Your mother didn’t tell him,” she whispered, knowing it was true. Of course Avril wouldn’t tell her husband, her wulver mate, what had happened to her while she’d been captured. And Sybil’s womanly heart knew instantly why Raife’s mother had kept it a secret.
“Not afirst,” Raife said, confirming Sybil’s suspicions. “If my father had known, he would have…”
“It would have been war,” she murmured.
“Aye. She was trying to save us from that,” Raife said, his voice hoarse. “And I think she did.”
“But she was pregnant,” Sybil mused aloud. “She couldn’t hide that for long.”
“My father took the pack hunting for Henry’s crown,” he reminded her. “He was’na here for my birth.”
“And when he returned?”
“I was raised by Bietris until she pupped Darrow. Then she finally told my father the truth.”
“But he didn’t go after Henry?” Sybil wondered aloud.
“By then, Henry had been crowned king of England. And my father had seen the result of living peacefully here in the mountain, without constant threats from the MacFalon,” Raife explained. “Alistair’s father, Lachlan MacFalon, was a different sort of man. He was enjoying the peace and quiet as much as my father and our pack.”
“Your poor mother…”
“She was a strong woman. And brave.” Raife lifted Sibyl’s chin, smiling into her eyes. “Like you.”
“She obviously loved you and your father very much.” She kissed him softly, her lips wet not just from the hot springs water, but also from the tears slipping down her cheeks. The sacrifice Raife’s mother had made for her pack, for her mate, made her own look small in comparison. But she knew, she would do anything for Raife, even what Avril, his mother, had done.
“My father would have done anything for peace after Laina’s mother was killed and his own wife taken,” Raife said, speaking Sybil’s thoughts aloud. “Sondra—Laina’s mother—was his brother’s own wife.”
“The MacFalons...” She said the name with such bitterness. “I wish I’d never heard of them.”
“The names matter naught, in the end.”
“What do you mean?” She lifted her head to look at him.
“MacFalons, wulvers, Scots, English. Men should be ready to fight when they have to—but far too many men want to go to war when there is no real reason. Peace is possible, and I think, when he made the wolf pact, Henry finally discovered a way to unite warring factions that worked.”
“A piece of paper?” she scoffed. “The wolf pact?”
“No, lass—the promise of a woman.”
“I don’t understand.” Sibyl wrinkled her nose, puzzled.
“The English and the Scots had already seen fighting for East March in the Anglo-Saxon wars. We Scots are a hearty lot. They can’t beat us down for long. Fighting the Scots wasn’t going to work and Henry knew it.”
“So he made you all sign a piece of paper?” The wolf pact. As if a piece of paper could keep men from fighting, she thought. It had worked for a short time, but Alistair had broken it by caging and killing wulvers again. There was no piece of paper that could bind a man so completely…
And then, Sybil realized—mayhaps there was.
A pact could be broken. Peace treaties were signed all the time, and men still went to war.
But a marriage contract? That was something altogether different. That was a holy covenant, sanctioned by God and the pope himself. It was undissolvable, or nearly so.
“What did Henry promise to give them, if the MacFalons and the wulvers fought for and won him the crown?” Sybil swallowed, afraid of the answer.
“You.” Raife said it, sounding so sad, and it hit her in the heart like an arrow. “Ye were the prize, the MacFalon’s spoils of war.”
“But I wasn’t even born!”
“Not quite,” he agreed. “Because it wasn’t ye, not at first. Your family have long been Tudor supporters. Your father and his brother?”
“Yes. Of course,” she agreed. “The Blackthornes have always been favorites of the Tudors.”
“Yer uncle once had a young wife and a daughter, didn’t he?”
“Yes.” It had been before she was born, but she’d been told about it by both her mother and her father. Her uncle had never remarried. “But they both died of fever...”
“Aye. But that girl was promised to the MacFalon,” Raife informed her, a fact Sybil’s parents had both failed to mention. “Godfrey Blackthorne was here with Henry in 1483. He promised his own daughter in marriage to a Scot in exchange for lands and a better title. He was the second son, after all…”
“And then she died…” Sibyl remembered the way her uncle had treated her after her father’s death, how he had treated her mother too. They were little more than property to him. A means to an end. Would he have treated his own daughter the same way? She had often wondered that, but now she knew the answer.
“Aye. ’Tis lucky for your uncle that you were a girl and could be promised to the MacFalon’s son.” Raife shook his dark head, kissing the top of hers.
“Lucky I was a girl…” she whispered. She’d never expected to hear that phrase in her whole life.
All that time her father had spent lamenting she wasn’t a boy! She had heard the arguments about who she would and would not marry her whole life. In the end, while her mother capitulated and often agreed with Sibyl’s uncle, her father had put his foot down.
Until her father had died and her uncle had married her mother and suddenly had final say in who she married…
“King Henry promised the MacFalons an English bride, a highborn lady, and everythin’ that came with it,” Raife told her. “All the riches, the land, the titles. Henry had no daughters at the time, but he promised the MacFalon his son would marry a Blackthorne, the daughter of his very own right hand man.”
“Godfrey Blackthorne.” Sybil’s uncle. “But that couldn’t happen because they died...”
“Yer uncle still worked out a way to keep his favor with the king and peace on the border.”
He certainly had.
Growing up, Sybil had been so close to her father, it seemed strange to her not to have a champion around when he was gone. Her life had turned completely upside down after his sudden death, and in her grief, while she had questioned her uncle’s precipitous marriage to her mother and his control over their fortune, she hadn’t paid enough attention. Not nearly enough.
She had been sheltered by her father, protected more than she knew. Once her uncle was involved in deciding her future, her world had crumbled around her. Her father had often said, “Sibyl will marry for love, not fortune,” when her mother pressed the point that Sybil was growing older, into her marriageable years.
It was her uncle who had been there all along, working behind the scenes, orchestrating a match that would benefit himself, as well as king and country. Sibyl would be given in marriage to Alistair
MacFalon as their reward, the spoils of war. A contract that couldn’t be broken, once it was made, one that solidified the bond between the English and Scottish far greater than any peace treaty.
But he never could have done so if Sibyl’s father had been around to protest it.
That realization made her stomach turn over.
She remembered her father in his last days. He had taken suddenly ill after dinner one night, and no amount of medicine would make him better. She had, with their local apothecary, tried everything, but he could hold nothing down. It all ran through him, until there was nothing left. It was days from the onset of the illness until his death, just days, and she had barely had time to grieve his loss before her uncle had been petitioning the king to marry his brother’s wife.
It was an arrangement that required not only the king’s blessing, but the pope’s as well, because while not blood related, marrying your brother’s widow was frowned upon. Of course, Godfrey Blackthorne had the king’s ear and could get what he liked. Her uncle always seemed to manage to get what he wanted, no matter the cost.
Sybil let Raife pull her close, his arms around her comforting, as she closed her eyes and remembered who had just happened to be visiting the night her father had taken ill. Would his own brother have done something so horrible, so heinous? She couldn’t imagine it, didn’t want to, but her uncle’s motivations had suddenly become clear.
Had her uncle killed her father—poisoned him, mayhaps? With Sybil’s father gone, he could not only honor the king’s wishes and provide the MacFalons with a highborn daughter to marry, he could also inherit all of his brother’s lands, his title—even his wife. Because a marriage contract, that was a covenant that could not be broken. Once her uncle was married to his brother’s widow, he would inherit everything. And once Sybil was married to Alistair MacFalon…
“Marriage.” She spoke the word softly, feeling it tighten around her neck like a hand. How close she had been to marrying a man she not only didn’t love, but one that would have spent a lifetime treating her like his property. She wondered, now, what her father’s motivation had been, treating his girl like a boy. Mayhaps he had hoped to protect her from his brother’s plan, and in the end, he had—even though his trust in his family had cost him his life.