Embers (11 page)

"It is you who are ill," said her light voice. "You who should have the bed."

"If I choose to have you in my bed, what do you think should stop me?"

The chills started again, chasing in waves across her skin. Not from cold.

"Only honour," she said into the lightless dark.

"Only
what
?"

"Honour." She swallowed. "Not mine. Yours."

"What a cutting way with words you have. I had forgotten. But this time, it is you who have missed your aim. Any honour I had was the first thing to die when Hun brought the king's army down on my home."

And his brother had been the second.

"I did not intend what happened to Athelwulf."

The words blurted out without thought. Wildly inappropriate. Lethally dangerous. She heard the hiss of his breath and this time she did feel its touch when he breamed out, like ice vapour on the burning heat across her cheekbone.

"Did you not? Then there are two things we have in common—lack of honour and bootless intentions. My brother Athelwulf, of course, says it was his choice, but then his honour remains—"

"Athelwulf
what
?"

She sat up through the frightening darkness, every muscle in her body rigid with the shock.

"Surprised I should say that? Or would you disagree with me because your lover had my brother flogged and enslaved?"

The danger in that perfectly cultured voice was unmistakable to her. Her mouth worked. But she was so shocked that no sound came out, which was what saved her.

Because all that beat through her brain were the words
Hun did not kill Athelwulf and
then the burning thanks to Saint Dwyn that it was true. Even while the sane part of her brain, the one that had made the ruthless decision to part her from the man she had loved and damaged, screamed silent warnings that the words could not be said aloud.

She was supposed to be the despicable creature Hun's whore. She was supposed to know already what had truly happened to Brand's brother.

She heard the faint sound of Brand moving. She tried not to imagine the
seax
blade or what he must feel in his heart.

"Of course, the only thing you can not know is that I had found Wulf again, because that happened the day I killed Hun. You cannot know what happened after he had been flogged and sold in slavery to that Frisian Goadel found."

The bedclothes shifted across her body as his weight moved, intimate as a lover's caress, unfeeling as a stranger's touch.

"My brother made his way back to England. To Wessex. It must have been a shock to Hun when he found out. Your betrothed must have thought Athelwulf was safely away, over the sea. That is, if Hun had not injured him sufficiently for him to die anyway, slowly and in pain."

Some small sound did escape her then. She could not help it.

"Do you not care to face what we two have done? Did you push all that from your mind in the greater knowledge that you were back with what was then one of the most powerful men in Northumbria? That in spite of your little lapse with me, you had secured a triumph for yourself? And, of course, for Pictland? Or do you want to know the rest? How Wulf came to live and Hun to die?"

She forced her head to move on the stiffness of her neck. She could not speak.

"Yet I cannot tell you truly what effort it took for Athelwulf to survive because he would not tell me. No one but him will ever know. But it is not too difficult to guess the times he must have wished that he had died as I believed he had, rather than endure what he did."

The softly breathing darkness seemed so heavy around her, inside and out.

"When did you know he was still alive?" Her voice stretched thin. "How did you find him?"

The silence and the dark remained unbroken for so long that she thought he would not answer. Then she heard the faint rustle of movement as he turned, towards her or away, she did not know.

"He saw me and I—"

He had turned away from her. She could tell by the sound of his voice. The short, cut-off sentence shimmered in the darkness, out of her reach, like him, holding the key to so much that she wished to know about him, about what he felt.

The night air raised gooseflesh for no reason, except that she was still attuned to him in mind as much as body, with the very essence of what she was. And he had said not
I saw him
, but
he saw me
. Her skin prickled with a different awareness, the way it did sometimes near clear water, near those dangerous places where other worlds could break through.

"What do you mean? Where were you?"

"In Mercia, trying to disentangle myself from the panicked remnants of the late King Osred's personal guards. They were fleeing down the coast road after witnessing Osred's murder. They thought I might want to stop them. I did not."

"No." It was a statement of belief. She did not know whether he would accept it. But she took the next step anyway.

"And your brother?" Such a small question. Yet it was not. The air in the cramped chamber thrummed. She did not know whether he would answer. She thought the great shadow of his head, with its rough tangle of hair, was still turned away from her.

"In Wessex. Somewhere. There was a clearing among trees and a great sheet of water, very still. The water was freezing."

The tension in him was palpable, even across the darkness that separated them.

"Water," she said with infinite care, "is very powerful."

She let that opening to the possibility of further speech hang between them. She did not ask directly how he had felt the coldness of this particular sheet of water when he had been many miles from it. She simply held her breath.

The bonds between Brand and his kin were unbreakable. Unlike the bond he had once had with her, a stranger. She bore the silence and waited.

"If he had not seen me, it is quite likely the axe that splintered my shield and hit my arm would have killed me."

She stared at the blackness of the steeply-pitched roof. The terror of near death blinded her mind, and with it came the urge to touch him through the dark. To know his wholeness, to forge a connection she could never have.

All she could do for him was speak, try to make him say what was in his thoughts. She shaped the next question.

"How did you find your brother?"

"I kept moving south. Once I knew he was alive I— The woman who now owned my brother had sent a man to seek me. I caught up with her messenger on the Icknield Way. That is how. Quite simple."

The silence was complete this time, not the slightest rustle of movement in the bated darkness. Not so much as the sound of her breath.

Quite simple.

Why had he told her so much?

The fierce, dazzling creature she had loved had been a warrior, first, last and always. Action had been the compass of his life, not dreams, not the unexplainable, nothing that could not be dealt with in practical terms.

Or so she had thought.

Yet even warriors had hearts, minds. They dreamed. Or they could not be human. They just.. they did not admit it.

Why had he done so? Now? All he had needed to tell her was about the messenger sent to seek him, not what had gone before.

The tension in the strong, dark bulk of his body was finely wound, lethal. The forbidden urge to touch him, to take some of that tension from him and into herself, was more than she could bear.

If she could not touch him, she must find the words. But words were so clumsy to express what she felt: such helpless longing for the bond of understanding that had once sparked between them.

"It happened because your brother means so much to you. Love can make people—"

"What? What can love make people do?"

She heard the rustle of his movement, sensed the speed, and then she was looking into the white blur of his face, the feral eyes.

"Tell me, Alina, what love can make people do."

It can make people do that which they hate most.

"I cannot."

"Nay, I do not believe that you can."

If only she could not see his eyes. If only she could stop feeling. If only her own need for him had not been enough to make her believe that he could want any comfort from her.

What he had said concerned his brother. He had said it to underline the closeness of his tie to his kindred. He wanted her to know that that was indissoluble.

Kin ties.

It was I who first found out you were alive, not your Northumbrian… Ask him about that…

But she could not. She forced Cunan's voice out of her head. She knew Brand was not hers. She had always known. .

She knew it to the depths of her soul.

He leaned over her, power locked in shadows, despite the traces of fever and exhaustion, despite the wound that would have taken his life but for his brother's love.

"Hear the ending. When I found Wulf, your lover had tried to buy him back. The request was refused. So Hun came, with all his followers, and with the wolf heads he had hired, so he could take my brother back by force."

The ending… She knew it beyond doubt.

"But you were there. You killed him, before he could harm your brother again."

The gleaming eyes never wavered.

"Yes."

She was not able to tell the man she loved that she was deeply, savagely glad that Hun's evil was gone.

"You have to know how things are. Your lover died at my hand, by the sword you held in that room at the nunnery. This time, I was there. This time I could save my brother. It was not revenge. It was justice. If there can be a difference."

"There can—" She stopped the words. She would not look at his eyes. He would see through her.

"What truly makes justice is the fact that after all that happened my brother found a happiness neither you nor I are capable of. He found someone who loved him."

She buried her face in her hands. But through all the pain of bitterness, ran the strand of fierce gladness—that something had been redeemed for the future, beyond any hope she had ever had, and beyond anything she had ever deserved.

The bitterness and the gladness seemed to fuse inside her, into a determination that would admit no boundaries. If such things could be redeemed out of the bleakness that filled the world, then it was proof that she had made the right choice.

The debt she had left to pay was the one that would assure the future.

Redemption.

"Can you understand that kind of justice?"

Yes
. The word screamed in her head. Her hands balled themselves into fists against her mouth. There was silence of an intensity that penetrated through flesh and bone while the ripples caused by that word spread out, washing over both of them.

"Can you?"

She regathered the threads of her will. The only possibility of redemption for Brand did not lie with her. It was impossible to repay the boon that fate had granted to one brother by damning the other to live on through the nightmare.

Somewhere outside these walls was Goadel. He wanted her. If she cast herself on Brand's mercy now, he would protect her with his life, whatever she had done to him. Because that was how he was. She could not allow it. She had seen him almost die already.

"Tell me what goes on in that beautiful head of yours, Alina. Did you fall out with Hun before he died?"

She could feel the same bone-eating intensity in his voice that had filled the silence. She forced her hands away from her mouth, straightened her hunched shoulders so that she might appear careless.

"No. It is your turn for disappointment. I had made my choice and this time I was happy with it. I have told you I regret what happened to your brother because he should have had no part in this. I am glad he is…well. But do not flatter yourself that it changes what I wanted."

"And just what, exactly, did you want?"

The great black shape of him was closer to her now. She could feel it breathe. Feel the thinly stretched edges of the control that held all that limitless power in place. Her mind sought desperately for the right words to say, the words that would fill the terrifying dark and the silence. The words that would convince a mind that had more depths than she yet knew.

She fell back on fragments of truth.

"What I wanted was my place in Me. And I wanted to please my father."

You should have seen the pain in our father's face when he thought for a second time that you were dead.

In the end, it is your true kin that you are bound to.

She swallowed. The fragments of truth hurt as much as the lies.

"You cannot know how it was at Craig Phádraig. My father…" Her mouth felt so dry. "My father and my mother hated each other." She made herself speak through the rawness in her throat "I did not tell you that There was a lot I did not tell you."

The truth fragments were like daggers. But they would pierce only her.

"There seems so little time to exchange confidences when you are fleeing pursuit We did not know each other at all, did we?"

"No."

She could feel the attention beating at her like waves hitting the cliffs.

"My mother hated Craig Phádraig. She might have been brought there for marriage, but in her heart she was always a Briton. All she thought of was her home in Strath-Clòta. She was supposed to do the same as me— prop up a useful alliance between two kingdoms who were uneasy neighbours. You have a name for it in English."

"
Frithuwebbe
." Peace weaver. The deep-voiced Northumbrian word took shape in the darkness like something you could get hold of. But of course you could not. The web of peace was as fragile as gossamer.

"It is not an easy thing to do. My mother left my father for a while. She took Modan and me back to Strath-Clòta, to the great palace at Alcluyd. Just a visit to see her own family. I was four when she took me there. By the time my father finally forced her to come back, I was nine.

"You saw the beauty of Alcluyd before I met you." She took a breath. Brand had seen two years at a court where he had been in much the same position Modan was now in at Bamburgh. "I know you must have hated it there—"