Behold the Dawn (28 page)

At the oblong opening that led to another room dug from the hillside, he stopped. Werinbert and Mairead knelt, side by side, both of them cloaked in the warmth of the torchlight. Before them, flickering in the shadows of a dozen candles, was a shrine—to St. Beuno no doubt, though it featured little more than a crude crucifix upon the wall.

Werinbert glanced once over his shoulder, and the quiver of the shadows made a ghoul’s mask of his missing teeth and shriveled features. He crossed himself with the quiet leisure of piety—“
In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti.
Amen.”—and struggled back to his feet.

In the doorway, he smiled and eased Annan backwards with the touch of his bony fingers. “She approaches Heaven’s throne.”

Annan nodded, his eyes still on where she knelt, praying so fervently. So innocently.

“She tells me you have a long road ahead of you.”

“Aye.”

“She is your wife?”

He glanced at the hermit. “Aye.” Save Marek, this was the only person he had told.

Werinbert nodded, his smile closing over his teeth. “Then I will pray to St. Beuno that the Lord blesses you with many sons.”

Annan’s lips tightened, and his gaze returned to Mairead. “You waste your kindness, Brother. There can be no sons at the end of our road.” Or, if there were a son, he would never know it.

For a moment the only sounds were of the wind outside, the night birds warbling, perhaps a wolf afar off, and the murmur of Mairead’s prayers. What was it she beseeched Heaven for tonight? Were her prayers, like Werinbert’s, for a son? Or did she entreat the mercy of death, as Annan had for so long? As he would once again when they separated for the final time.

“Do you wish to pray too, Master Knight?”

His mouth tried to quirk but could not. “I have no prayers Heaven would hear, Brother.”

“You are so certain?”

He forced a smile. But it held no mirth. “Indeed.”

Werinbert said nothing more, but the hand he laid on Annan’s shoulder carried all the power of a blessing. Annan pulled out from beneath its pressure. He would not accept the blessings of this pious hermit. He couldn’t accept them. They would only grind him deeper into the ashes. He stepped into the shrine to join Mairead, and he didn’t wait to see if the hermit was offended.

Behind Mairead, he stopped, but she didn’t look up. He could hear by her breathing that tears had been shed, but he did not kneel to comfort her. He would wait. She was Heaven’s before she was his, and he would never begrudge her that.

His gaze found the rude carving of Christ upon the cross, head slumped against a slack chest. Werinbert had no doubt fashioned it himself, his careful handiwork evident in the wood’s soft burnish.

Annan clenched his jaw, drawing tight the cords of his neck. Would that he could say of himself, as he did of Mairead, that he was Heaven’s.

It was a thought that would have brought Marek’s mouth gaping open in astonishment. It was a thought Annan had not released from the closed doors of his soul in many a long year. But standing here in the flickering shadows of this hermit’s dreary shrine to some unknown saint, the emptiness of worthless life struck him as it had not since the years directly following St. Dunstan’s and his great sin.

The carving of Christ had no eyes, but Annan stared into the empty wooden features and felt once more the call of Almighty God. Another lifetime ago that call had been his obsession, just as it had been Gethin’s. His hand clenched involuntarily, the nails digging into his palm.

Neither of them had been strong enough to carry its burden.

Mairead, hands still pressed together before her chest, twisted her head until Annan could see the glisten of a tear track against her cheek. “My lord.”

“What do you pray for tonight?”

“For you.”

He shook his head. “Don’t.”

“I promised. You don’t remember?”

Aye, he remembered. Slowly, he knelt behind her and closed her into his arms. He remembered leaving her at Stephen’s, remembered being so close to telling her, as he had Brother Werinbert, that Heaven would not hear her prayers. “What have you prayed for me?”

She crossed her arms over his, her hands on his elbows, and let him hold her against his chest. “That Heaven will bless you as you deserve.”

He laughed, but it caught in his throat. “Spare me that, lady.”

She looked back at him, and the softness of her hair tickled against his neck. “And I prayed for peace and for happiness and for joy.” She looked away, and he laid his chin on top of her head.

“Those are things I have never found—save with you,” he said.

“What about when you were yet a child? What about before—” She chopped herself short.

He would have said
before St. Dunstan’s
. But she had no knowledge of the ill-fated monastery. Her meaning was more along the lines of
before you became the monster you are now
. She did not think those words, of course. But they were there, nonetheless, lurking in the blank, unread depths of her.

“Yes. I was happy before.” Even after the fight with his brother, and the deaths of his sister-in-law and her unborn children, he had found happiness. The fiercest, most spectacular joy he had ever known had been in the dark
scriptoriums
of the monastery, reading and learning from the sacred manuscripts as he copied them. He had drunk them in, making the words of Heaven so much a part of him that even now they sometimes echoed in his head.

But that time was long past. And the irony of it bit hard.

She shifted her head out from beneath his chin and leaned to the side to peer into his face. “Are you angry with God?”

He shook his head and freed one of his arms to rub a strand of her hair between his fingers. “It is right that He should allow no evil in His presence. I know that.”

“You are not evil.” The firelight flickered in her dark eyes.

“Yes, I am. Without forgiveness.”

“Then seek forgiveness.”

“Nay, lady. There are sins which even God does not forgive. I have struck Moses’s rock; I will never see Canaan.”

“And so you wander in the desert for the rest of your life?” She lifted her free hand to his face, and he leaned against its warmth. “Without me?”

“I will not drag you into darkness with me, Mairead.”

Her stomach tightened beneath his arms. Some emotion deepened in her eyes. Not abhorrence, as he half expected, not even fear. Just… sadness. Her hand slipped from his cheek to the back of his neck. He dropped his head onto her shoulder and let her hold him, her other hand coming up to cradle his face. She whispered, the breath of her words close beside his ear, “All this because of Matthias.”

He closed his eyes against the dancing shadows.

Nay, not because of Matthias.

Matthias’s death had not been his great sin. It had been his greatest good.

Chapter XX

A HAZE MISTED the morning sky outside the window hole when Mairead woke. She lay still for a moment, curled in the warm nest of blankets and straw. The hermit had insisted they take his own pallet for the night and would not brook no for an answer. She stretched her legs out straight until one foot emerged from beneath the blankets, then she rolled onto her back.

One glance sufficed to tell her what she already knew: that Annan had left. He was never beside her when she woke; how he left without disturbing her she didn’t know. A smile touched her lips. He must have the stealth of a cat. She stretched her arms above her head, pulling at all the muscles in her chest and stomach. The smile deepened. The image of Marcus Annan with the feet of a cat bordered on hilarity.

She laughed. It must be the morning air. Hilarity, after all, hadn’t been the word to describe anything that had happened to her in the last year.

Kicking back the blankets, she rose to her feet and leaned her head out the window. The morning air, full of dew and the sharp scent of cypresses, cleared her head and filled her chest with their pungency. She smiled again. No, hilarity wasn’t the right word; but in the midst of all this strain and sorrow, a thread of happiness had certainly been woven.

The insane happiness of a bride.

Right now, she could manage insanity. For the next twenty days, she could manage it.

A horse nickered, and she leaned farther out the window to catch a glimpse. But the animal was too far away. Only the unruly green of the hillsides, rising in all directions, filled her vision, and that only dimly through the fog.

As she started to withdraw, she caught sight of a horse’s round, open-ended prints upon the ground beside the hill. The prints were too large to belong to Marek’s palfrey. Had Annan gone scouting?

She bit her lip, but the sound of his voice farther down the passage, speaking in low tones with Brother Werinbert, forestalled the frown. A note of music vibrated her throat, and she turned to where her clothes were folded. She was happy today, happier than she deserved to be, happier than last night’s talk of supplications and sins should have left her.

Annan’s heavy stride approached and stopped on the other side of the crude wooden door that partitioned the tunnel. “Are you awake, lady?”

“Who can sleep on a morning like this?” Would that make him smile? She tugged tight the drawstring in the side of her gown. His smiles were as rare as desert ice, but she could find one if she tried hard enough.

“Marek’s bringing up the horses. When you’re ready, Brother Werinbert will give you something to break your fast.” The words were as gruff and straightforward as everything else that proceeded from his mouth, but she could hear the little rumble that meant he was at least thinking with a smile.

And that, for some reason, made her want to laugh aloud as she had not done since before leaving England. “I will be only a moment, my lord. If you’re smiling, save it for me at least that long.” She had a right to laugh this morning. She would have plenty of time to shake her head at their folly after they reached St. Catherine’s.

“I’ll see what I can do.” This time she could most definitely hear the smile tugging at his mouth. “Don’t be long.” He started back down the passage, and she twisted to draw the strings on the other side of her dress.

It was the work of only a moment to gather her cloak and Annan’s few blankets and fold them into a neat pile. Her hair swung past her shoulder as she bent for the last blanket, and she shook it back. How long was it since she had been able to wear it on her head, beneath the wimple of a married woman, as it should be? Annan liked it long, she knew, liked to rub it in his fingers when his thoughts were far away. But the heat and wind of their journey had dulled it; it had lost the virgin luster of only a year ago.

She straightened and took a last look at the barren cell that was one more jewel on the silver chain of memories that would have to last her the rest of her life. As she turned to go, a footstep fell on the other side of the door that led deeper into the tunnel.

Frowning, she turned back to hear better. “Marek?” But Annan had said Marek was with the horses, and she had heard Annan and Werinbert through the opposite door.

A hand scuffled, groping in the dark, and the latchstring pulled in, raising the bar from its cup. The door grated open. Framed in the crude entry, a man-at-arms, sword in hand, hunched his shoulders to step through.

She cried out and started back.

The knight came forward, and the light fell on the battered features of Hugh’s lieutenant.

Bertrand.

Mairead’s scream ripped through the morning fog.

Halfway to the waterfall, Annan jerked to a stop just as surely as if someone had cut his feet from under him. He groped for his sword and spun around, his instincts chasing him back to the hermit’s hillside shelter before his mind could even begin its frantic grasping for scenarios and reactions.

She screamed again, not so loud, and then all the world went still—all but the blood pulsing in his ears. He burst through the ragged entry and flew down the tunnel, shoving past the hermit, skidding to a halt at the closed door that barred the next section of the tunnel—Mairead’s section.

Footsteps scrambled on the other side, and he slammed past the door in time to see a mail-clad knight climb through the window. The man glanced back once, flashing the features of a stranger, a Norman.

Fire surged beneath the surface of Annan’s skin. He took a quick step forward, ready to pursue. But he went no farther. The fire turned to ice and froze solid within his veins.

Before him, limbs a-tangle, her hair strewn across her face, lay his wife. And the red stain creeping down her side, seeping into the blue of her gown as fast as the tide of any sea and dripping from the fingers of one hand, was the first sight of blood to bring the prickling sweat of fear to his skin.

He lurched to her side. “Mairead—” Long association with wounds led his hand to the tear in her gown just beneath and to the back of her armpit. He pressed his palm to the ruined flesh, and her blood squeezed up between his fingers. With the other hand, he cleared her hair from the sudden clamminess of her face. “God…” The word was both prayer and imprecation.

Her eyes, the pupils shriveled to mere specks, came wide open, and flickered ‘til they found his face. A ragged whimper stumbled through the trembling of her lips, and she raised a hand, flailing, until he caught it in his own. “Mairead—”

Her breath came in fast gasps. “Help me…”

He clenched her hand, his own bones aching with the fury of his grip. He couldn’t help her.
He couldn’t help her.
Her life was seeping out beneath his fingers. “Be still, Mairead—be calm—”

She closed her eyes, the lines in her cheek rigid, and terror seized him such as he had never before known. Not even his anger was match enough for terror such as this.

“Live.” The word was barely a whisper.
Don’t die
—and that
was
a prayer, even though he knew he deserved that she should die. Even though he deserved that everything that had ever meant anything to him should be torn away.