“You won’t ask him yourself?” The furrow between Cynric’s eyes deepened with suspicion.
“We’re only two swords, but perhaps they’ll be useful.” Alain tipped his head toward me. “His more than mine.”
“Your service,” I muttered, as a grip of ice clutched my gut. My brother’s gaze on me sharpened. I didn’t—couldn’t—meet the critical judgment in his dark eyes.
“My thanks,” Cynric said. “For everything.” Was that actually a note of humility in his voice? The cups on the table rattled as Cynric pushed his chair away and abruptly stood. “Marcus, find me a messenger with a fast horse. The rest of you prepare. We have a battle to win.”
Rather than face my brother, I watched the duke stride from the hall. But once the great doors closed behind him, there was no other place to turn.
“What goes?” Alain asked in that tone of measured calm with its layer of exasperation rumbling just beneath it that he used with me now more often than not.
His smoked eyes, when I met them at last, held only concern, question. Where then was this anger that was building in me coming from?
“Why would you pledge me in this battle?” I asked, striving for that same low, calm tone as the men around us swallowed down the last of their mead in sober silence and left the hall.
Brinn laid her head across my knee and stared at Alain.
“I spoke only to duty,” Alain answered. “Your appearance is all that is necessary. Someone will need to remain behind to defend the flank.”
“If I’m thralled to The Beast, I’m a danger to all.”
“Only through inaction. But if you’re in a place where action won’t be required anyway…”
I grimaced around the acrid taste of bile in my throat. “That’s not as much balm to my pride as you might think.”
He clapped a brother’s hand on my shoulder. “In past deeds you’ve proved yourself a magnificent warrior. Horsed and far from the call of The Beast you still are. Worthy of your name being sung in courts and on the battlefields. Right now, though, you are whole in neither body nor soul. There is no shame in being caught in circumstances beyond your control. And there are far too many battles ahead of us for you to worry about your place in this one. I look upon our pledge to fight as a political gambit, not one of personal glory. It is our offer of support that will be remembered.”
Brinn whimpered in what I could only take as sympathetic affirmation of Alain’s rationale. Not for the first time did I wish her out of her hound form to better hear her counsel.
Reluctantly, I nodded my agreement to my place in the coming battle as I handed down Cynric’s trencher with its half-eaten meal to Brinn.
Only then did it occur to me—wrapped as I was with my personal demons—that while I would be cowering in the rear, my dear brother would not be there, but in the very thick of the fighting, alone, without me.
By God’s sweet bones! What good did it do to have magic dripping through my blood if there was no way to use it—to transfer my skill with a blade to Alain, to mask myself from The Beast, to be a help not a hindrance when my brother put himself in harm’s way?
“Luck to you,” I told him, not wishing to embarrass him with my fears.
As ever, he could see right through my pretenses, right to the heart of me.
“Luck to us all,” though, was all he said.
40. Brinn
Living with Alain and Pel the last few weeks, I was frequently reminded of the chasm that gaped rude and deep between their people and mine. Many of their biases I’d found to be laughingly groundless, but none so much as their attitudes toward women. Not the brothers’ alone, to be fair, but as the farmers and artisans and guild merchants marched into Warwick Keep with swords so poorly fashioned they were more like to break than skewer, and draped in crude attempts at armor scales that would not turn even a blade of the softest metal, I searched in vain for the women who would take up arms at their husbands’ and brothers’ and lovers’ sides.
A whole population of able-bodied women missing from the battle. Fae had never slighted our women so, but Alain, when confronted, was quite adamant in his agreement.
“Women are intended to be the mothers of our future. How can they bear our heirs if they’re slaughtered on the land?”
“And should you lose your land, they’ll be bearing your enemy’s heirs.”
“And what is the alternative? Our strength lies in the number of men born to protect our holdings. If we lose women in battle, then there are fewer to birth our future armies and we diminish as a people. We are not fae.”
“So you gamble on losing your battles?”
“We gamble on surviving if we win.”
Alain’s argument chased itself more thoroughly than the waters swirling in an eddy.
“We have had women warriors, you know,” he added. “Great leaders of battle whose songs are sung by firelight over cups of mead.”
“Their names?” I asked. “Perhaps I’ve heard such songs.”
“Camilla, for one, sung widely in Latin lays. Irene and Theodora—”
“—to be fair,” Pel interjected, “Irene and Theodora were mere figureheads. Wise counselors, to be sure, but neither ever wielded a blade.”
Were? Suspicion fluttered at me. “How long past?”
Pel’s brow furrowed as he no doubt struggled to recall history lessons. “Some few years,” he ventured at last, his sensuous lips quirking into a sheepish grin. “It was Athens and Constantinople they ruled after all, not Rome.”
“You have to look for examples beyond your own heritage?”
“Camilla was Latin.”
I stared my next question at Alain and he winced. “I know of her through Virgil’s Aeneid. A thousand years. Maybe more.”
“So you know no recent examples?”
“Of Romans, no. But Grandfather spoke a time or two of an Amazon here in the Isles, far to the north. A she-warrior who routed the first wave of Romans to these shores. Before his time, of course, and I’ve assumed since that his was simply a tale to entertain young boys barely more than babes.”
I frowned. “If a thing is so rare, it’s far from the natural way. I’ve seen a calf with five legs and a snake with two heads, but were I to be asked how many legs or heads each animal has, I would not caveat my answer but say four legs or one head and still speak true.”
Pel favored us with one of his rare laughs. “If battles were fought with words, I think, fae or not, women would win each war.”
Perhaps. But here today I knew victory was each of ours in simply keeping The Beast at bay one more day.
~ ~ ~
Pel was restless the night before battle. Distracted. I clung close, kissing his eyes, his cheeks, his parted lips while I writhed against him, imploring his attention. He hardened enough to bury himself in my sanctuary for a few fleeting moments before he slipped from me—from us—again.
Alain was right to protect him, through no man could be as dangerous to him as The Beast that lurked somewhere beyond the walls, a thing apart yet closer than any mortal enemy. Wrapped around Pel, his head smothered between my breasts, I looked to Alain for solace.
Alain circled us in his arms and tipped his forehead to mine. “Nothing is more important than the moment that’s in our hand,” he whispered.
I smiled. “When did you grow so wise?”
“The day I met you,” he murmured before capturing my lips and we could say no more.
41. Pel
We pretended nonchalance, Alain and I, on the morning of a battle that had come too quickly. The fact, though, was that neither of us had faced an enemy horde in actual combat before. Melees and tourneys, some conducted with cleverly crafted practice swords and others with live steel, were as close as we ever came to battle conditions.
We had, of course, been blooded in single combat and in the camp of the fae, but those were not battles that dragged on for days or weeks. Dearest God, I prayed, whatever the outcome, let it come s
wiftly. And for mercy’s sake, keep The Beast away.
Alain, Brinn the Hound, and I gathered with the other soldiers on the field just outside the keep’s walls in the red light of morning. Five hundred would have been a generous count of the number of solemn men hiding their fright behind crude swords and makeshift shields.
“Ours is no great keep with fortressed walls built to withstand a siege,” Cynric proclaimed as he marched up and down the ragged lines. “The walls are not our first line of defense but our last. So we will meet Gyrd on this field and hold him here. Warwick Keep will not be handed over for the asking. We bow to no liege but King Pellam!”
The latter was clearly for mine and Alain’s benefit, I thought, as the ragtag army dutifully cheered. Which of those voices would be silenced before the coming battle was done?
I shook my head to clear such thoughts. Wasn’t threat of The Beast enough weakness?
The score of knights the duke commanded took charge then, dividing the small army and ranging them on the western field before the keep. Built on a high spit of land that intruded into the waters of the River Avon, the keep was naturally protected from attack on three sides by cliffs that fell into the river.
Too soon Alain turned to me and said, “May honor find you, brother. May it find us all.” We clasped arms and I flung thought daggers at the concept of duty that had brought us to this.
With elegant ease, Brinn raised herself up and placed a fine-boned paw on each of our clasped arms.
Then, somehow, Alain’s grip was no longer there and he was grinning his farewell. The tightness of his lips and the lines about his eyes, though, suggested he didn’t share the same confidence as his grin.
I mustered as much encouragement into my return expression as I could.
“The rest of you with me!” The knight’s cry distracted me just enough that when I looked again, my brother was gone, disappeared among the wave of soldiers scattering like spiders from their nest.
Those left were two boys barely bearded, a man of sixty or more winters, another crippled with rheum … and me. We followed the knight who looked like he should have seen his last battle many seasons past to our post beside the main gate. There I knelt in the meadow grass with Brinn at my side and waited for Gyrd’s men to come.
~ ~ ~
A volley of arrows announced their arrival. Then a period of quiet while both sides grouped. From my protected vantage I watched the small skirmishes that broke out late that day and into the next.
“Can we not just be done with this?” I muttered into Brinn’s neck as I clung to her hound in the dead time of waiting.
She padded off the first evening and the next to share a few hours in Alain’s blanket before The Beast might come and the night terrors engulf me. Each time she returned I was grateful to know my brother safe when she settled comfortably in the hollow space at my side. She didn’t chance shifting from her hound, but my body easily remembered her silken skin, the fullness of her breasts and the soft reaches of her womanhood. Of its own on the second night, my staff responded to that memory. I took a few slow breaths and deep to tame the display while the wicked bitch settled more firmly against me and ran her knowing tongue along my jawline, tickling my ear at the end.
“Stop it,” I pleaded.
She responded with a well-placed wriggle. That was one taboo she knew as well as I was ironclad, and still she teased.
“Did you torture Alain so?”
And suddenly she was warm flesh and woman in my arms. Instinctively I raised my head and checked for where the watch might be.
“The others sleep,” she assured me. “But we must be quick.”
“Quick I can be.” I wrapped her in my arms and pressed inside. She clenched around me and a few moments later bucked in a way that should have had a cry accompany it. It was only a moment more before my strangled breaths matched her silent ecstasy as we rode to the peak together. I was gasping still when her lips met mine and we calmed ourselves in a deep and sensual kiss that took us to the valley below. Then with a twitch of her hips she released me, melting again into her fire-tipped hound.
I curled around her and we slept, though it couldn’t have been another hour gone before the night terror began.
~ ~ ~
Brinn’s fair face hovered above me. The passion in her eyes flared like sunlight dancing over two perfectly cut emeralds, then dying to a dusky sea-green as her trembling lips parted in an “O” of ecstasy. She pulled back—or maybe I did—and I saw why I felt nothing of my own ecstasy. It was Alain she was riding. Alain’s lidded eyes and gritted teeth and head thrown back beneath hers. Alain caught in the last throes of his release.
I begrudged my brother none of it. Truly not, and this was none of my nightmare. Surprise, yes. Disappointment, maybe. But jealousy? At times, I think, I hovered at its edge, but more in brotherly rivalry than in the dark emotion that drove some men mad, and more than a few to murder.
Then Alain, spent, collapsed. He looked at me, and I saw a familiar shadow pass across his beloved face. “Go,” he ordered. “You’re not welcome here. You never were.”
His words cut sharper than any knife. “Alain, you don’t mean—?”
“I do!” he roared, throwing Brinn from atop him. His face, twisting in fury, became the very image of Brinn’s Edern.
Instinctively I grabbed for my sword hilt. Gone. I lay naked and unarmed on a field of grass. I waited for the Alain/Edern creature to attack. “Brinn,” I whispered, half in plea, half in sorrow.
Behind the brother-creature I saw her kneel, shifting. And when I saw the thing she shifted to, I screamed.
~ ~ ~
I woke to a cool hand over my mouth and a warm voice in my ear. “The Beast.”
Brinn shimmered in the moonlight, neither hound nor Beast but lovely fae.
“It’s near.”
“What?” I mumbled the word into her hand, caught still in nightmare and not yet comprehending.
“You dreamed of it, did you not? It’s close enough by to thrall you if you let it.”
To thrall me. To beckon me away from Brinn and brother. That was truly my greatest fear. Wasn’t it?
“I can feel it,” I breathed.
“Yes.”
“It cozens my thoughts. Tugs at my blood.”
“Yes.”
“If I follow it, I’m lost.”
“Yes.”
“I lose Alain.”
“Yes.”
“I lose you.”
Her breath hitched. “Yes.”
“One day it will win me.” It was not a question.
A breathspace passed. Then another. Then I heard Brinn’s “No.” Soft. Not an assertion but a denial.
Already I felt the sharp ache of losing them.
“We saved you once,” Brinn said. “We will again.”
The Old Magic in my blood pounded in my heart. I saw again the nightmare version of Brinn shifting into the thing I’d come to … what? Loathe? Love?
“No,” I spoke. Though in answer to what vision, what future I did not know.
Without fanfare the east sky brightened and The Beast retreated before the coming day. A pang, sharp and cruel, shivered through me as I cursed the dawn. In that moment, I was desperate to keep Brinn in her true, unsecreted form beside me, irrational though that longing was.
“Don’t go,” I begged.
“Never,” she breathed into my ear even as her voice lost power to speak and her sublime fae form slipped into that of the hound.
I readied myself to face another cold and empty day. How could brother, Beast and Brinn all be so near—and yet so far away?
The morning passed in eerie quiet—the hush before the gale. No skirmishes, no testing of arms. Nothing but a collective breath before the catapult arrived behind the team of yoked oxen. As siege engines went, it wasn’t overly impressive, rather on the small side. I peered into the distance, looking for more, but it seemed this was to be the only one.
&nbs
p; Given enough time and stones, the catapult could, of course, reduce the keep’s walls to rubble. But the troops on either side would long be dead or the battle won before it came to that.
What the first volley did manage was to turn the fighting closer to the walls where my small contingency tarried.
Gyrd’s men had waited on the arrival of the catapult to fully engage. By noon, the skirmishes increased to a full-on assault.
Three heavy stones slammed one after the other into the wall behind us, shivering the structure and cracking the mortar, each wreaking more damage than the last as the oxen advanced the weapon and the warriors manning it took its range.
Then a battle line formed where there had been none before. A living line that snaked first toward us then away then advanced like a rolling wave, gathering men into it as it pushed our way.
Brinn yelped, a sound of startlement from one not easily plussed.
“God’s wounds!” The cry came from the old man guarding the keep’s entry with us.
I would have been less surprised to see The Beast charging the field. Though to go by storied accounts, such sights were common enough in the days when our Christ received the wounds of that oath.
A brace of short-furred brutes of dogs rushed from the battle line. The razor-sharp spikes bristling from their collars were designed to shred horse legs in close fighting, but they would as easily shred a man’s as well.
The dogs, however, were interested in neither horse nor man. Whether they found her by hound sight or fae scent, it was Brinn they were after now.
“Run!” I implored.
All long legs and light trot she could easily outpace them. Instead, she bristled and held her ground.
I had no stomach for slaying these dogs—men, not they, had loosed them as weapons upon the field. But while a farmer might not blame a fox for following its nature, he will still protect his hens.
Scrambling to Brinn’s side, I raised my blade. “Then I’ll be a fool with you.”
Brinn spared me a look, half love, half disdain—in other circumstances so comical an expression, so human, I would have laughed.
Shifters After Dark Box Set Page 116