Embers (31 page)

The trap was all around him. It would hold him. She would. Her hand tightened on his, but that was a mistake, some terrible miscalculation, because the thick flesh under hers flexed and there was nothing under her hand, emptiness. She had lost even the touch of him.

"Brand—"

Her hand reached out in desperation for him, sought his hand, his arm,
him
. He stilled. But his face was frozen.

"Do not touch me."

She followed his gaze to look at her hand on his arm, the pathetic fingers that could not hold his strength, and she understood.

"I know what you are truly afraid of. You are afraid you might hurt me." The snare snapped tight.

His arm slid out from under her grasp and he was too strong for her to hold him, even though the noose was tight round him like something he could not escape. She had not foreseen the cruelty of that.

"It is not true. I know it. You would never harm me."

"You are afraid of me, even now. I think you have always been afraid of me."

"No…" Her voice sounded horror-struck and she cursed her weakness because he would not understand why. She cursed her fears through all the times she had known him, and the times she had let him see them.

She stared at the moonlit dark.

"I have been afraid of so many things. But never that you would harm me, not even when it seemed as though you had every reason. All that you have ever done since I have known you has been for my good and not for my harm. I have never trusted anyone as much as I have trusted you."

She thought he would turn away from her. He did not. The soul's power.

"That is what I cannot break," he said.

She could not touch him. He would not allow it. But she did not have to touch him to know the tension in every ice-sheeted muscle. Even if she had not been able to see him, the very air around him would have told her.

"You could not harm me, not you of all people."

She sensed, as much as saw, the rustle of his movement, the way all that matchless strength collected itself into one force of intensity.

"How can you say that? How can I?"

Saint Dwyn grant me the words.

"Because I know you. At last. Completely and beyond mistake."

"You do not. You have not understood." The intensity of the way he felt would withstand fire. She could not break it. All she could do was help him to break it.

"I do not believe you." It sounded merely stubborn, willful. Yet she felt the intensity sharpen. That was good. If he was angry, that was very good.

She stood up, head high. Somehow she found the power to keep her feet. Her stance settled into the same seeming willfulness as her tone.

She could feel his anger. She guessed all that it hid.

"Alina, can you not understand?"

"No."

True and not true, as ever. She left it at that and walked across the room, her thin shift billowing in the moving air. The cold seemed to burn her skin, like his gaze. She took her time over every step, the way she used to walk across the great hall at Craig Phádraig when the kind of baffled rage he was feeling pressed on her own heart.

But she had never had to face what he did.

She found what she wanted in the blackness beside the richly curtained bed. Simple. She picked it up.

"Because I do not understand, you will have to show me." The snake-patterned hilt slipped into her hand. She adjusted her grip, moving her thumb all the way round the gold-wired hilt. She unsheathed. The rune-blade made a sound that was colder to the human ear than the winter frost that could crack stones.

"What in the name of the saints are you doing?"

One saint.

The saint who took pity on lovers.

She cast the gilt-chased scabbard aside. She turned round with a length of three feet of lethal steel in her hand.

"I do what I will. Always."

"Put that down—"

She jerked the sword upright in her hand as a length of about six feet of lethal Northumbrian uncoiled itself from the window seat.

"Make me."

She tightened her grip.

"I do not know what you think you are about."

Making you angry enough to want to kill me. But you will not, because you will not be able to.

"Put it down. You will hurt yourself."

Perfect reply for an insane berserker.

"Take it off me then. It will be the only way."

She waved the blade, it tilted crazily. Light sparked off its edges. She could see the elk-sedge rune on the cross guard close to her hand, moon-white in the darkness. Her eyes dazzled. Brand moved.

The shadows and the moonlit ice that made up his body blocked everything else from her sight. The brutally shadowed gaze caught hers. There was gold behind that darkness. She knew there was. She got the blade under control. More or less.

"I will take the sword."

So you will.

Shivers ran down her spine as he began circling her, moving to the right, out of the sword's range but crowding her with his size, the precisely placed movement of his naked feet Her own body twisted round, following that deadly quiet pacing so that she could keep him in sight.

Despite the pain in his ribs that he must feel, he moved with a sinuous ease she could not match. His gaze seemed fastened not on the flickering gleam of the sword that she could not hold steady, but on her eyes.

Modan had said that you could tell what your enemy would do by looking into his eyes.

She could not tell anything.

She tried to hold that black gaze, but she could not even do that much. Her eyes kept straying to the light and shadow of his body as it moved in that feral dance, lithe despite the wounds, utterly full of purpose. Solid, close-linked muscle tightened and stretched under gleaming skin, everything collected into a controlled, sinuously moving power, from the wide shoulders, the dense torso and compact hips to the springing, curving line of arm and leg muscle.

Controlled.

She smiled. Even though her heart beat so fast it would choke her breath.

The circling steps moved closer, pushing her back towards the wall. She fought for breath, forcing the instinctive smile to broaden, change, become taunting at the edges.

She straightened her arm, extending the sword in a futile attempt to widen that dangerous circle. Her muscles ached already from the awkwardly held weight of the blade, from trying to control its blinding power. She could not imagine how people fought with such things, except that was what she was doing. For him.

That was the key. It was a sword of protection. It was branded as such, with an Atheling's rune. She was no runemaster but she and Brand had been born Athelings, princes. The sword had spoken to her. She knew it spoke to him.

The smile on her face stretched her skin.

"What are you waiting for?"

She waved the tip of the blade. It sliced small deadly circles through the charged air. He did not step back, so she did, her breath catching. Because the battle-sharp steel was far too close to the bare sheet of his skin.

"Well?" she said, pinning the sneer back in place. She could not take much more of this. Her uncertain feet stumbled, nearly sending her sprawling backwards over a stool she had not seen behind her. That made the narrowed intensity of his eyes flash with all the fury she could wish for.

She realized she was cornered. She blundered left, but there was no room. She stumbled, fighting for balance, trying not to wave the sword in case she hit him.

"Stay away—" she yelled, her voice not taunting but deadly earnest this time, because she did not know whether she could control the lethal length of steel.

Idiot
, shouted the sane half of her brain,
reckless idiot
. But then he was there.

She saw the moon-silvered shape gather itself, the solid thigh muscle flex, the abdomen tighten. The wide shoulders became straight Her vision filled with the dark-gleaming wall of his chest, his hand found hers, found the sword hilt, yanked it out of her grasp with a strength that was full of wild fury, matchlessly reassuring.

The breath left her throat. She did not so much as attempt resistance. Because what she had done was far too dangerous, more so than she had thought.

Because she had what she had wanted: him armed and dangerous, angry beyond belief.

NO ONE MOVED.

He was jammed against her in the narrow space between the massive curtained bed and the wall.

Alina could feel every part of Brand's body, the flat tautness of his belly, the sinfully rich swell of his thighs pressed against her. Her gaze saw nothing but the broad immovable barrier of his flesh, the skin ice-cold, bleached of colour by the moon's light. She could see its whiteness and its blue-black shadows, so close her sight could pick out each of the small dark body hairs that dusted the centre of his chest, blossomed round each taut flat nipple.

The wildness of his breath fought against the ice-locked wall of his chest, swelled the tight curve of muscle above the confining band of linen.

"Why in the name of all the saints would you have done such a thing?"

For Saint Dwyn's sake, who can release people from bonds of frozen ice.

"You could have been hurt."

She raised her head.

"No. I could not." She did not know why Modan had thought it was possible to hold your opponent's gaze during a duel to the death. "That is the point."

She watched the rapid leap of understanding and all that came after it.

"Do you mean to say that is what all this madness was about? Some insane kind of test to see what I would do?"

"Nay. I knew what you would do. It was only you who did not."

"I should run you through with the blade for that."

The sword rested in its natural home, like some obedient extension of his lethal arm. She stared at it, as the less deadly alternative to looking into his eyes.

"Nay, Atheling, we both know that is an empty vaunt." She felt all the hard-packed muscle crowded against her tighten into steel. If you questioned a warrior's boast, they had to prove it. Always.

She felt a large, battle-roughened hand close over her jaw, lifting her face with an exquisitely slow inexorability.

"Why?"

She did not know what the question was. She was just utterly lost in his eyes.

She answered what had suddenly become the smaller question, because she could not cope with anything else.

"Duda says you do not know yourself."

"
Duda
? What has he got to do with—"

"He says you are not nearly as good at being impulsive as you think you are. I think he is right. I…

wanted you to know. Now that you do, it is all right. I…I will go to Strath-Clòta. As you wish."

The Northumbrian word he used did not lie within her knowledge of English. But she did not need to know the finer details. She could see through the brightness of his eyes. She could see what her heart wanted to see more than anything, the knowledge that inside the anger he had been afraid for her. Her heart clenched and the world's shape changed again.

His eyes were not cold, not ice locked at all. They burned, with a heat that could sear straight through her. The same heat was in his skin, in the touch of his hand on her flesh.

She stared at him, at the naked, fiercely-honed strength, the thickness of each separate male muscle, the finely-held stance, the sword balanced easily in his hand. She stared at his eyes, the heat and the wild edge and the liquid melting depths. His eyes were quite gold. No shadow could disguise that. They held the fascinating hint of bated dangers and all the achingly needed safety of tenderness.

The haughty mask that had served her for so long slipped. She could not keep the consciousness out of her face because she knew, now, how things were. He had stirred that knowledge in her with his touch and his passion and his own knowing, and she would never be ignorant of it again.

His eyes read what she could not hide: the need inside her and the wildly-beating wanting that were the mirror image of his. That recognition of her desire, the flare it brought in the flame-gold eyes sent an erotic jolt through skin and sinew and blood, and the way he held her, flesh joined to flesh took on a different edge. His strength was the most blatantly exciting thing she had felt. Her body thrummed with an aliveness, a hunger, it was impossible to deny.

The proud head bent to hers. She watched it and her skin tingled because of his nearness. His face blurred, just the harshness of dark gold stubble, the fierce rise of his cheekbone.

"I would rather take up your first offer."

"What—" Her breath whispered with his, joining with it in the same heat.

"My bed."

She caught the gleam of his eyes. The softness of the mattress hit her back with a satisfying thud. The thick bed linen smelt of herbs. Vervain that conciliated hearts. Her breath caught and she clung to him.

He did not let her go. His touch held all the thwarted passion and all the savage pain of what had been. Yet there was nothing in it that could make her fear and as his body moved against hers, his skin and his hair caught the slanting gleam of the moon's rays through the open window. That was what she saw and what she felt, the brightness of the light.

She held him softly because of the wounds, moulding the slightness of her body against his so that he would feel the warmth. She ran her hands over every undamaged inch of him so that she could stroke his skin, know with her touch each of the battle-hard mus-cles she had seen, learn every lean length and every tight curve, every taut expanse of rough-smooth warm-ness or satin heat.

But mostly so that he could know she was there.

She felt only the madness of excitement when his hands freed her of her shift. His gaze touched her with the same fiercely felt hunger as his hands.

The effort it took to lie quite still, bared to the cold silver light of the moon and the molten heat of his gaze, was not what she expected. Her mind anticipated the cloying rush of shame but it did not come, or else the heat in his eyes burned through it.