Nora Roberts's Circle Trilogy

by Nora Roberts

  “This is something I miss in the city,” she commented. “I do a lot of windowsill pots, but it’s just not the same as real gardening.”

  Hoyt said nothing, simply watched her—bright hair sparkling with rain, slim white hands brushing through the green. It closed a fist over his heart, just one quick squeeze and release.

  When she stood, her arms full, her eyes laughing with the wonder of it, that heart tipped in his breast and fell as if an arrow had pierced it.

  Bewitched, he thought. She had bewitched him. A woman’s magic always aimed first for the heart.

  “I can get quite a bit done with these.” She tossed her head to swing back her damp hair. “And have enough left to season a nice soup for dinner.”

  “Best take them in then. We’ve movement to the west.” Larkin nodded toward the west edge of the woods. “Just watching for now.”

  Bewitched, Hoyt thought again as he turned. He’d forgotten his watch, spellbound by her.

  “I count half a dozen,” Larkin continued, his voice cool and steady. “Though there may be more hanging back. Hoping to lure us, I’m thinking, into going after them. So they’ll be more, aye, more hanging back to cut us down as we come.”

  “We’ve done what we need for the morning,” Hoyt began, then thought better of it. “But no point letting them think they’ve pushed us back inside. Moira,” he said, lifting his voice enough to carry to her, “can you take one out at this distance?”

  “Which one would you like?”

  Amused, he lifted a shoulder. “Your choice. Let’s give them a bit of something to think about.”

  He’d barely uttered the words when the arrow flew, and a second so quickly after he thought he imagined it. There were two screams, one melding into the next. And where there had been six there were four—and those four rushed back into the cover of the woods.

  “Two would give them more than a bit to think about.” With a grim smile, Moira readied another arrow. “I can wing a few back into the woods, drive them back more if you like.”

  “Don’t waste your wood.”

  Cian stepped to the window behind her. He looked rumpled and mildly irritated. Moira automatically stepped aside. “Wouldn’t be wasted if they struck home.”

  “They’ll move on for now. If they were here for more than a nuisance, they’d have charged while they had the numbers.”

  He walked past her to the side door, and out.

  “Past your bedtime, isn’t it?” Glenna said.

  “I’d like to know who could sleep through all this. Felt like a bleeding earthquake.” He studied the garden. “Your work, I assume,” he said to Hoyt.

  “No.” The bitterness from the wound inside him eked out. “My mother’s.”

  “Well, next time you’ve a bit of landscaping in mind, let me know so I don’t wonder if the house is coming down on my ears. How many did you take out?”

  “Five. Moira took four.” Larkin sheathed his sword. “The other was mine.”

  He glanced back toward the window. “The little queen’s racking up quite the score.”

  “We wanted to test the waters,” Larkin told him, “and see to your horse.”

  “I’m grateful for that.”

  “I’m thinking I could take him out for a run now and again, if you wouldn’t mind it.”

  “I wouldn’t, and Vlad could use it.”

  “Vlad?” Glenna repeated.

  “Just my little in joke. If the excitement’s over, I’ll be going back to bed.”

  “I need a word with you.” Hoyt waited until Cian met his eyes. “Privately.”

  “And would this private word require standing about in the rain?”

  “We’ll walk.”

  “Suit yourself.” Then he smiled at Glenna. “You look rosy this morning.”

  “And damp. There are plenty of dry, private places inside, Hoyt.”

  “I want the air.”

  There was a moment of humming silence. “He’s a slow one. She’s waiting to be kissed, so she’ll worry less about you getting your throat ripped out because you want a walk in the rain.”

  “Go inside.” Though he wasn’t entirely comfortable with the public display, Hoyt took Glenna’s chin in his hand, kissed her lightly on the lips. “I’ll be fine enough.”

  Larkin drew his sword again, offered it to Cian. “Better armed than not.”

  “Words to live by.” Then he leaned down, gave Glenna a quick, cocky kiss himself. “I’ll be fine, as well.”

  They walked in silence, and with none of the camaraderie Hoyt remembered they’d shared. Times, he mused, they’d been able to know the other’s mind without a word spoken. Now his brother’s thoughts were barred to him, as he imagined his were to Cian.

  “You kept the roses, but let the herb garden die. It was one of her greatest pleasures.”

  “The roses have been replaced, I can’t count the times, since I acquired the place. The herbs? Gone before I bought the property.”

  “It’s not property as the place you have in New York. It’s home.”

  “It is to you.” Hoyt’s anger rolled off Cian’s back like the rain. “If you expect more than I can or will give, you’ll be in a constant state of disappointment. It’s my money that bought the land and the house that sits on it, and mine that goes to maintaining both. I’d think you’d be in a better humor this morning, after romping with the pretty witch last night.”

  “Careful where you step,” Hoyt said softly.

  “I’ve good footing.” And he couldn’t resist treading on tender ground. “She’s a prime piece, and no mistake. But I’ve had a few centuries more experience with women than you. There’s more than lust in those striking green eyes of hers. She sees a future with them. And what, I wonder, will you do about that?”

  “It’s not your concern.”

  “Not in the least, no, but it’s entertaining to speculate, particularly when I haven’t a woman of my own to divert me at the moment. She’s no round-heeled village girl happy with a roll in the hay and a trinket. She’ll want and expect more of you, as women, particularly clever women, tend to.”

  Instinctively he glanced up, checking the cloud cover. Irish weather was tricky, he knew, and the sun could decide to spill out along with the rain. “Do you think if you survive these three months, satisfy your gods, to ask them for the right to take her back with you?”

  “Why does it matter to you?”

  “Not everyone asks a question because the answer matters. Can’t you see her, tucked into your cottage on the cliffs in Kerry? No electricity, no running water, no Saks around the corner. Cooking your dinner in a pot on the fire. Likely shorten her life expectancy by half given the lack of health care and nutrition, but well then, anything for love.”

  “What do you know of it?” Hoyt snapped. “You’re not capable of love.”

  “Oh, you’d be wrong about that. My kind can love, deeply, even desperately. Certainly unwisely, which it appears we have in common. So you won’t take her back, for that would be the selfish thing. You’re much too holy, too pure for that. And enjoy the role of martyr too much as well. So you’ll leave her here to pine for you. I might amuse myself by offering her some comfort, and seeing as we share a resemblance, I wager she’ll take it. And me.”

  The blow knocked him back, but not down. He tasted blood, the gorgeous burn of it, then swiped a hand over his bleeding mouth. It had taken longer than he’d assumed it would to bait his brother.

  “Well now, that’s been a long time coming, for both of us.” He tossed his sword aside as Hoyt had. “Let’s have a go then.”

  Cian’s fist moved so fast it was only a blur—a blur that had stars exploding in front of Hoyt’s eyes. And his nose fountaining blood. Then they charged each other like rams.

  Cian took one in the kidneys, and a second strike had his ears ringing. He’d forgotten Hoyt could fight like the devil when provoked. He ducked a jab and sent Hoyt down with a kick to the midsection. And fou
nd himself on his ass as his brother slashed out his legs and took his feet out from under him.

  He could have been up in a fingersnap, ended it, but his blood was hot. And heated, preferred a grapple.

  They rolled over the ground, punching, cursing while the rain soaked them through to the skin. Elbows and fists rammed into flesh, cracked against bone.

  Then Cian reared back with a hiss and flash of fangs. Hoyt saw the burn sear into his brother’s hand, in the shape of his cross.

  “Fuck me,” Cian muttered and sucked on burned flesh and welling blood. “I guess you need a weapon to best me.”

  “Aye, fuck you. I don’t need anything but my own fists.” Hoyt reached up, had nearly yanked off the chain. Then dropped his hand when he realized the utter stupidity of it.

  “This is fine, isn’t it?” He spat out the words, and some blood with it. “This is just fine. Brawling like a couple of street rats, and leaving ourselves open to anything that comes. If anything had been nearby, we’d be dead.”

  “Already am—and speak for yourself.”

  “This isn’t what I want, trading blows with you.” Though the fight was still on his face as he swiped blood from his mouth. “It serves nothing.”

  “Felt good though.”

  Hoyt’s swollen lips twitched, and the leading edge of his temper dulled. “It did, that’s the pure truth. Holy martyr, my ass.”

  “Knew that would get under your skin.”

  “Sure you always knew how to get there. If we can’t be brothers, Cian, what are we?”

  Cian sat as he was, absently rubbing at the grass and bloodstains on his shirt. “If you win, you’ll be gone in a few months. Or I’ll see you die. Do you know how many I’ve seen die?”

  “If time’s short, it should be more important.”

  “You know nothing of time.” He got to his feet. “You want to walk? Come on then, and learn something of time.”

  He walked on through the drenching wet so that Hoyt was forced to fall in beside him.

  “Is it all still in your hands? The land?”

  “Most of it. Some was sold off a few centuries ago—and some was taken by the English during one of the wars, and given to some crony of Cromwell.”

  “Who is Cromwell?”

  “Was. A right bastard, who spent considerable time and effort burning and raping Ireland for the British royals. Politics and wars—gods, humans and demons can’t seem to get by without them. I convinced one of the man’s sons, after he’d inherited, to sell it back to me. At quite a good price.”

  “Convinced him? You killed him.”

  “And what if I did?” Cian said wearily. “It was long ago.”

  “Is that how you came by your wealth? Killing?”

  “I’ve had nine hundred years and more to fill the coffers, and have done so in a variety of ways. I like money, and I’ve always had a head for finance.”

  “Aye, you have.”

  “There were lean years in the beginning. Decades of them, but I came around. I traveled. It’s a large and fascinating world, and I like having chunks of it. Which is why I don’t care for the notion of Lilith pulling her own sort of Cromwell.”

  “Protecting your investment,” Hoyt said.

  “I am. I will. I earned what I have. I’m fluent in fifteen languages—a handy business asset.”

  “Fifteen?” It felt easier now, the walking, the talking. “You used to butcher even Latin.”

  “Nothing but time to learn, and more yet to enjoy the fruits. I enjoy them quite a bit.”

  “I don’t understand you. She took your life, your humanity.”

  “And gave me eternity. While I may not be particularly grateful to her as it wasn’t done for my benefit, I don’t see the point in spending that eternity sulking about it. My existence is long, and this is what you and your kind have.”

  He gestured toward a graveyard. “A handful of years, then nothing but dirt and dust.”

  There was a stone ruin overcome by vines sharp with thorns and black with berries. The end wall remained and rose in a peak. Figures had been carved into it like a frame, and had been buffed nearly smooth again by time and weather.

  Flowers, even small shrubs forced their way through the cracks with feathery purple heads drooping now, heavy from the rain.

  “A chapel? Mother spoke of building one.”

  “And one was built,” Cian confirmed. “This is what’s left of it. And them, and the ones who came after. Stones and moss and weeds.”

  Hoyt only shook his head. Stones had been plunged into the ground or set upon it to mark the dead. Now he moved among them, over uneven ground where that ground had heaved, time and again, and the tall grass was slick with wet.

  Like the carving on the ruin, the words etched into some of the stones were worn nearly smooth, and the stones bloomed with moss and lichen. Others he could read; names he didn’t know. Michael Thomas McKenna, beloved husband of Alice. Departed this earth the sixth of May, eighteen hundred and twenty-five. And Alice, who’d joined him some six years after. Their children, one who’d left the world only days after coming into it, and three others.

  They’d lived and died this Thomas, this Alice, centuries after he’d been born. And nearly two centuries before he stood here, reading their names.

  Time was fluid, he thought, and those who passed through it so fragile.

  Crosses rose up, and rounded stones tilted. Here and there weedy gardens grew over the graves as if they were tended by careless ghosts. And he felt them, those ghosts, with every step he took.

  A rose bush, heavy with rich red blooms grew lushly behind a stone no taller than his knees. Its petals were sheened like velvet. It was a quick strike to the heart, with the dull echoing pain behind it.

  He knew he stood at his mother’s grave.

  “How did she die?”

  “Her heart stopped. It’s the usual way.”

  At his sides, Hoyt’s fists bunched. “Can you be so cold, even here, even now?”

  “Some said grief stopped it. Perhaps it did. He went first.” Cian gestured to a second stone. “A fever took him around the equinox, the autumn after…I left. She followed three years after.”

  “Our sisters?”

  “There, all there.” He gestured at the grouping of stones. “And the generations that followed them—who remained in Clare, in any case. There was a famine, and it rotted the land. Scores died like flies, or fled to America, to Australia, to England, anywhere but here. There was suffering, pain, plague, pillage. Death.”

  “Nola?”

  For a moment Cian said nothing, then he continued in a tone of deliberate carelessness. “She lived into her sixties—a good, long life for that era for a woman, a human. She had five children. Or it might’ve been six.”

  “Was she happy?”

  “How could I say?” Cian said impatiently. “I never spoke to her again. I wasn’t welcome in the house I now own. Why would I be?”

  “She said I would come back.”

  “Well, you have, haven’t you?”

  Hoyt’s blood was cool now, and eking toward cold. “There’s no grave for me here. If I go back, will there be? Will it change what’s here?”

  “The paradox. Who’s to say? In any case, you vanished, or so it’s told. Depending on the version. You’re a bit of a legend in these parts. Hoyt of Clare—though Kerry likes to claim you as well. Your song and story doesn’t reach as high as a god, or even that of Merlin, but you’ve a notch in some guidebooks. The stone circle just to the north, the one you used? It’s attributed to you now, and called Hoyt’s Dance.”

  Hoyt didn’t know whether to be embarrassed or flattered. “It’s the Dance of the Gods, and it was here long before me.”

  “So goes truth, particularly when fantasy’s shinier. The caves beneath the cliffs where you tossed me into the sea? It’s said you lie there, deep beneath the rock, guarded by faeries, under the land where you would stand to call the lightning and the wind.
”

  “Foolishness.”

  “An amusing claim to fame.”

  For a time they said nothing, just stood, two men of striking physical similarity, in a rainy world of the dead.

  “If I’d gone with you that night, as you asked me, ridden out with you, to stop as you said at the pub in the village. A drink and a tumble…” Hoyt’s throat went hot as he remembered it. “But I had work on my mind and didn’t want company. Not even yours. I had only to go, and none of this would be.”

  Cian slicked back his dripping hair. “You take a lot on yourself, don’t you? But then, you always did. If you’d gone, it’s likely she’d have had us both—so it’s true enough, none of this would be.”

  What he saw on Hoyt’s face brought the fury rushing back into him. “Do I ask for your guilt? You weren’t my keeper then or now. I stand here as I did centuries ago, and barring bad luck—or my own idiocy in letting you drag me into this thing and the serious risk of a stake through the heart, I’ll stand here again centuries after. And you, Hoyt, food for the worms. So which of us has destiny smiled on?”

  “What is my power if I can’t change that one night, that one moment? I’d have gone with you. I’d have died for you.”

  Cian’s head whipped up, and on his face was the same hot temper it had held in battle. “Don’t put your death, or your regrets, on me.”

  But there was no answering anger in Hoyt. “And you would have died for me. For any one of them.” He spread his arms to encompass the graves.

  “Once.”

  “You are half of me. Nothing you are, nothing that was done changes that. You know it as I know it. Even more than blood, more than bone. We are, beneath all that, what we ever were.”

  “I can’t exist in this world feeling this.” Emotion swirled now, into his face, his voice. “I can’t grieve for what I am, or for you. Or for them. And damn you, goddamn you for bringing me back to it.”

  “I love you. It’s bound in me.”

  “What you love is gone.”

  No, Hoyt thought, he was looking at the heart of what he’d loved. He could see it in the roses his brother had planted over their mother’s grave.