Behold the Dawn (29 page)

He shoved his hand deeper into her wound. Why should he be surprised? Why hadn’t he realized it before? The very fact that he cared for her had endangered her more than Hugh de Guerrant and Bishop Roderic and all the infidel host.

“Annan—” Her eyes opened, stared straight ahead, then slid to the left to find his face. She pulled the weight of her other arm from beneath her side and tried to raise it. It faltered, and he caught it, pressed it against his mouth.

“I—” each word was a breath “—love—you.”

He stared into her eyes, feeling the finality of her words, and he could not reply. But he knew, in the deepest part of him, that if there were any love left in his body, it would have belonged to her until the end of time. That admission was a sword with the ability to plunge deeper even than that which had cut her down.

“I love you,” she said. Her eyes closed; she drew one more breath. And then she left him, her body falling slack in his hands.

For a long, long instant he held her, still feeling the pulse of her blood against his hand. Behind him, Brother Werinbert’s shuffling footsteps came to a stop, but Annan didn’t turn to see the sign of the cross that no doubt accompanied the hermit’s gasp. He lifted his gaze from the body of his wife—one more dead he must add to his tally—and the lines of his face hardened into crags of stone as his eyes found the daylight shining through the window.

Her murderer had escaped through that window, and even now, in the distance, he could hear the trampling of hoofbeats that marked his escape. Anger gusted through him, scattering his terror and his pain like ashes on the wind, leaving him once again with only the desperate heat of his rage.

With a precision that bound his trembling hands, he laid Mairead onto the earth, straightened her arms, and rose to his feet.

“Sir Knight—” Werinbert said.

Annan took two steps to the window and heaved himself through. His feet touched the ground, and he started running. Ahead of him, only halfway up the first hill, rode a knight on a red horse. He would kill that knight before this day was over.

In the corner of his vision, he saw Marek frozen on the path from the waterfall. The lad’s mouth fell open at the sight of his master’s bloody hands and sleeves. “Annan—”

But Annan didn’t stop. He ran across the valley, blood pulsing behind his eyes with every beat of his heart. The rider looked back once, his hand against his cantle, then urged the horse, in leaping bounds, up the face of the hill. He merged with the sun and vanished in a wink of light.

Annan felt the strain of his own bulk the moment he reached the incline of the hill, and he wished, not for the first time, for Marek’s nimble feet. He reached the ridge with his breath hot in his chest, his throat swollen, his muscles clenching in his calves. Far below, the man who had struck down his wife rode his chestnut with a speed that even the Moslems and their fleet-footed war mares would have admired.

Annan stopped. Never on foot would he be able to overtake the murderer. His sword dropped to the shale at his feet. Its bitter clang echoed once, then faded into the rustle of the trees.

He growled, the sound deepening in his throat, filling his body. Pain, as strong and as real as the ache in his hip and the cramps in his sides, exploded against his ribs. The growl turned to a roar. “
God!
”

He could bear up no longer. The punishment was just, yes! Hadn’t he always borne it as just? Had he ever once complained that Heaven’s wrath was any more than he deserved? Nay! He had thought it too little. He had always been ready to face the death that was his due.

But for others to pay for his crimes? He could bear it no longer. Gethin had nearly died because of his folly. His brother’s unborn children had never known life because of him. And now—

He held his hands before him, the streaked red of his palms facing up. They trembled as they had not since his first battle as the Earl of Keaton’s fifteen-year-old squire.

And now his hands bore the blood of the woman he had vowed to protect.

“
Why?
” The cords of his neck pulled tight. “Why punish me any longer? Why do You care! Why not let me die?” His life held no purpose anymore. Except…

He lifted his head to see the speck of dust and blue climbing the distant hill. The murderer had to have been sent by either Lord Hugh or Father Roderic. Annan would find him. If it took until he was a crippled old man, he would find him.

He bent to pick up his sword. Marek had been right. Hugh de Guerrant had won, after all.

But the Norman had best savor his victory while it was yet untainted.

Wind had shredded the clouds by the time Annan reached the hermit’s hillside home. He hunched his shoulders to enter the first cell. Only the angry lashings of the wind penetrated the thick sod walls. It whistled through the row of windows down the tunnel, mournful and eerie. A dirge.

The sound of it caught somewhere in his middle, pulling at his innards, tearing them apart. His eyes burned, and he threw his head back, breathing through his nostrils. So this was Marcus Annan, the famed tourneyer? Renowned for his strength, his unmovable power, his composure?

He closed his eyes. God had made him strong. Life had made him stronger. How was it, then, that he had been destroyed in a single blow—by a woman?

The wind screamed, rattling something in the tunnel, and human voices murmured. Opening his eyes, he made himself unclench his fists. He ducked through the second doorway and followed the tunnel until he found the glow of firelight that he knew would be Mairead’s Requiem Mass.

In the doorway, he stopped, unsure how to brace himself against the blast of pain he would find around the corner. But when his eyes found her still, white form, it was not pain that swelled within him—it was shock and yet another burst of rage.

He swore and leapt at Marek, snatching him from where the boy knelt at Mairead’s side, his bloodied little fingers ripping at her bodice. “What in the name of the faith do you think you’re doing?”

He slammed him against the wall so hard the lad’s teeth rattled, and then he slammed him again. Battle fire hummed inside his skull. His hands tightened on the front of Marek’s tunic. “You filthy cur! She is yet my wife!”

“Annan—” Marek scrambled for air. The fingers of both hands clamped round Annan’s forearm, and he tried to force him off.

Behind him, Werinbert struggled to his feet. “Master Knight! Please—”

“No,” Annan said. “Don’t touch her.”

“Annan!” Marek’s eyes glittered. “Don’t be a fool! She’s not dead!”

He dropped the lad as though his hands were full of hornets and spun around. “What?”

Werinbert had taken Marek’s place at Mairead’s side. With one swift movement, his hands pulled away from each other, and he tore her blood-blackened bodice down the side, revealing the unnatural crimson beneath. At a glance, Annan saw that they had already bound a dressing into the wound. Werinbert glanced once over his shoulder, as if to assure himself that Annan hadn’t killed Marek, then laid a length of muslin bandage to the dressing and stretched it across her chest. “Raise her up.”

Annan’s frozen limbs would not allow him to move. Marek darted past him to Mairead’s other side and dropped to one knee. With a tenderness Annan had never really appreciated, he raised her shoulders so that Werinbert could pull the bandage beneath her and begin another wrap.

And it was then that Annan saw the shallow dip of her stomach, just beneath her breastbone. It rose and dipped again. Blood rushed back into his fingers; the hair of his scalp and his arms lifted; a chill raised gooseflesh.
She was alive.

Alive.

The word was a desperate sweetness upon the back of his tongue.

Werinbert looked up at him again, the shadows catching in the bags beneath his eyes and making them pop even more than usual. “She lives, Master Knight.” He spoke as if reassuring a young son.

Annan shifted his gaze back to the monk’s face. “I am to blame for this.”

Marek dared a quick look up from Mairead, but he kept still. No remonstrance, no crowing, no sage and knowing expressions.

Somehow that cut past Annan’s defenses with a sharper blade than any of the lad’s impertinence and disrespect had ever managed. Marek had been right. Annan had been wrong. That was the whole of it. And Mairead lay here now because he had been wrong. His lower legs suddenly felt like water, and he sank to his knees. Had he been wrong his entire life?

As Marek and the hermit bound Mairead’s wound and finally laid her upon the floor and covered her cold limbs with a blanket, Annan knelt and watched, his hands hanging limp and useless upon his thighs. All he felt was the roaring hole of blackness in his middle.

She wasn’t dead. That should have been enough to fill the hole. But it wasn’t. If anything, the roaring screamed louder.

Werinbert leaned his head over her, invoking the sign of the cross in the air above her. “In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. The wound was red, the cut deep, the flesh sore, but there will be no more blood or pain ‘til the blessed Lord comes again.”

He turned to look over his shoulder. His expression was passive, his eyes calm with a peace Annan had been questing after all his life. “I know not why you think yourself guilty of what another man has done to her,” Werinbert said. “You have chosen to keep your sins to yourself, and I am not a confessor. But I would ask you something.”

Annan made himself look into the hermit’s face, made himself see the movement of the man’s shrunken lips, the quiver of his protruding throat.

“Do you think Christ came only to forgive those whose sins are little? He did not, my son.” Werinbert shook his head. “He died for the greatest of sins as well as the smallest.”

Another chill lifted the hair on Annan’s arms, and for a moment the howling of the black hole within him calmed. For a moment it was still. The blackness disappeared, and a pale, shivering light surfaced in its stead. He waited, feeling it tentatively enlarge to fill the empty space, feeling the kiss of its warmth.

Farther down the tunnel, the wind shrieked, its cold breath rattling in the hillside. It touched his skin, and he flinched. The light inside him flickered, rebounded… died.

He exhaled, and his eyes dropped back to the blood on his hands. “Nay, Brother.” The light of a guttering candle could not hold back the darkness of a lifetime. He shook his head. His eyes drifted back to Mairead’s cold, still form.

Werinbert laid a hand on his shoulder and used it to support his weight as he dragged himself to his feet. His hand lingered. “Pray for her, my son. Mayhap this time it shall be the pearl that shall buy the treasure.”

He left, his sandals scuffing against the hard-packed floor, and Marek stole out after him.

For a long time Annan didn’t move. Didn’t move, didn’t think, only felt. Finally, he rose up off his haunches and inched closer to her side. Only her lips moved, parting slightly with each breath. His heart ached at the sight. The pain of it was new and strange.

He had loved but little upon the long, winding road that had led him here. And now he thanked Heaven he had not. The pain of steel against his flesh, of broken bones, and shattered muscle—these things he could bear. But not this. Not this.

This
had broken him inside. All that was left of his strength was his rage. And God.

And of the two, his rage was by far the weapon that fit better in his hand.

He lifted a strand of her hair and rubbed it against the roughness of his thumb. She did not move, did not respond, did not soften her eyes at his gesture—and he felt the need to cry out. Had he been able to, he would have thrown himself upon her and held her to the warmth of his body, breathing his own life into her, filling her veins with his own blood in place of that which she had lost.

But he could not. He was helpless. “God,” he said, “there are no chances left for me. I know. But… save my wife.”

That was all he could offer. He laid the strand of hair back onto her shoulder, straightening it atop the blanket, all the way down to her waist. Then he rose in search of Marek. Time was short, and they would have to move with all haste.

He could do nothing more to save her life. He had no choice but to admit she was in the hands of Heaven. But he
could
act where he was best suited.

His face hardened. His vengeance would be swift: within a fortnight new names would be etched in his tally of dead.

“Annan, this is madness.” Marek stood a few paces off from where Annan was saddling the gray courser. His arms were clamped against his chest, as much from stubbornness, Annan suspected, as from the chill of the wind. “She could die, even on a journey as short as that.”

“Just as she’ll die if Hugh finds her here.” He pulled tight the girth strap and dropped his stirrup to the courser’s side. His hand stroked the horse’s hard flank. Mairead had named him well, for indeed he was like iron. Even after his already long, twisting journey north from Acre, the courser was still the best suited of the three mounts for another trek. And only the saints knew how long this one would be.

He reached for the rein and turned to face Marek. “She’s not safe here.”

“She wasn’t safe at Stephen’s either.”

“Stephen is the only man in this country I can trust. I am trusting her to him—and to you.”

“Why? Why trust me with her? You’ve never trusted me before.”

“Don’t believe that.”

Marek’s arms unfolded. “Then you come with us. If something happens, you could protect her better than me.”

“No.” His gaze shifted to the horizon, to the darker storm clouds gathering there. “I have other things to do.”

“You mean more blood to spill. Annan—” Marek shook his head, and again there was that look that made it hard to remember foolishness ever being this boy’s playmate. “Don’t. Don’t do this. This time, let it go. For me.” He took a step back. “And for yourself.”

Werinbert appeared in the darkness of the hillside’s entryway. Annan’s gaze darted to him, searching for the solemnity, the tears, the sorrow that would mean Mairead was gone. But of the three, only solemnity darkened the crags of his face. The hermit laid one bony hand against the side of the doorframe, watching them, but saying nothing.