Queen's Heart: An Arthurian Paranormal Romance (Arthurian Hearts Book 2) (2 page)

I named the herbs I thought would help. “Ranulf, do you need others?”

The chirurgeon shook his head and pointed to the small bag he was already pulling bandages and balm from. Then he frowned. “I could use a fat-bladed dagger and a cloth to wrap the hilt.”

Brangien left at a run to fetch the items needed.

Meanwhile, Ranulf laid a slim, finely tempered knife with an edge as keen as I’d ever seen on the grate directly over the fire in the brazier. After a few moments he turned the blade to heat the second side and handed me a wooden stick. “Put this between his teeth and hold it there so he doesn’t bite through his tongue.” He tossed a pinch of dried dead-nettle into the brazier and the smoke sweetened in response.

I ran my hand up along the other side of the harper’s neck from where the gash was, feeling the fever-heat beneath the surprisingly soft skin. My own heart echoed the race of pulse that beat kestrel-quick under my fingertips. My palms ached to follow the hard curves of his chest, and only Ranulf’s presence tempered that temptation.

“My Lady, I’m ready.”

I nodded and slid the stick over full and perfect lips. “Bite,” I instructed, unsure whether he was too far gone with fever to understand. His lower jaw twitched in response. Or it could have been my imagination so faint was the pressure applied.

A flurry of footsteps announced Brangien’s return. “Will this do?” She held a dagger half the length of her arm with a blade as wide as her hand at its base.

“As well as any,” Ranulf said. “Now heat the flat side as hot as you can.” He removed the slim knife from the brazier grate to make room. “He’s lucky he came to us when he did.”

I nodded. I had seen wounds filled with contagion that took weeks to cure. Without the complication of poison, this one would heal quickly. As it was…

Easing my left hand beneath the harper’s jaw, I held the bite stick in place with my right.

Two swift cuts and the first of it was over, with only a small whimper and a hardening of his jaw to indicate he was half-aware enough to feel the pain. The chirurgeon let it bleed out. Although I knew it necessary to cleanse both wound and body, I grew alarmed at the amount Ranulf let flow when the harper grew so weak that his jaw slacked around the bite stick.

“Surely that’s enough—” I began.

Apparently Ranulf thought so too as he moved almost at the same time to snatch the dagger from the brazier by its winding cloth handle. “Hold him,” he commanded.

Quickly he laid the heated steel over the raw wound. At its first touch the harper flinched, but pain and poison drove him into a blessed swoon. My nose wrinkled at the stench of branded flesh.

After a moment it was over. Ranulf returned the dagger to the brazier in case the flow of blood was not fully staunched and it was needed again. I held my breath, my eyes riveted on the wound until after the space of a hundred heartbeats it was clear Ranulf’s ministrations were successful.

“My part is done.” Ranulf was curt but confident as he packed away his tools and medicants. “The rest is up to you. Send for me only if contagion sets in. He looks to be a strong young man otherwise. If the poison hasn’t spread too far, you have a chance to save him.”

He must have sensed my doubt for he laid a sure hand over mine. “Trust your abilities, my Lady. Your Queen Mother taught you well.” With that he claimed his bag and headed off to other duties, leaving Brangien and me alone to tend the half-naked stranger washed upon our shores.

Under a pair of the fairest and wisest hands I’ve ever known, I woke to a world I thought never to see again. Wounds I’d known before—my body was traced with the scars of them. But the poison… only a base-born villain would tip his weapon with so vile a means to defeat his foe.

I shuddered. I had ears and a brain and lay in a corner of one of the busiest rooms in this fair woman’s keep. Fate does indeed have a sense of the most perverse of humors. When I could gather wits and voice enough, I asked, “My Lady, why do your men mourn?” if only to hear her confirm what I already guessed.

When she stopped spreading balm into my wounded shoulder I wished I hadn’t spoken. When she curled a hand against my chest and peered with concern into my opened eyes, I was glad I had. Gladder still when she broke into a smile so radiant my poisoned heart skipped a beat at the sight.

“Seems Ranulf was right. You
will
live.”

I did my best to smile back. “I hope that wasn’t the answer to my question.”

Her laugh was like springtime. And ended just as quickly when I hoped it would go on forever. “Of course not. They mourn my uncle. Who didn’t live.”

“I’m sorry. You were close?”

“He was a very powerful man, in body and holdings both. And he was kin. It is our duty to mourn, but I doubt any were close to The Morholt.”

My poisoned blood froze. “The Morholt? Sir Marhaus? I’ve heard songs of him. A giant among men and first knight to the Irish king, was he not? How did he die?”

“In battle. King Mark of Cornwall refused to pay his yearly tribute and sent a champion in its place. He and The Morholt fought and by some deviousness Mark’s man slew my uncle.”

“Deviousness? You believe the fight was not a fair one?”

The flawless expanse above the lady’s storm-colored eyes creased as she gave thought to that.

“Cornwall has had no champion before now skilled enough to defeat The Morholt. Whitehaven’s knights do not wish to believe there is one now. It makes it easier to hate.”

“And what of you, my Lady? Do you wish to hate as well?”

Her hauntingly naked stare bore its way into my very soul. “I wish the truth, whatever may come of it.”

Did she already know what I’d just come to realize? In my delirium I’d landed upon the Irish shore at Whitehaven, home to The Morholt’s sister and his closest kin. Who were even now providing succor to the champion who’d slain him. Fairly I might add, while it was the great and respected Marhaus who had struck
me
with a poisoned blade.

I struggled to sit, though still so weak the lady easily pushed me down again. “Not yet,” she whispered.

Fever clawed at me still.
Not yet?
Whitehaven was home to fifty knights who all answered to the queen who was The Morholt’s sister. One word of revenge from her while I lay helpless on a pallet in her hall and I could be beheaded or quartered or run through by a score of swords.

Was that what the queen’s daughter meant when she entreated
Not yet
? That I was to lay here till my punishment could be decided? Willing myself calm, I glanced about, finding my harp and sword against the near wall, a good two arm-lengths away.

In haste I made a decision that had little of valor in it, but that gave me my only chance at life so long as I remained at Whitehaven. “If you would, my Lady, I would have my harp by me. The Morholt’s death needs a song. I will fashion one for him—for you—and sing it when I am whole again. If it pleases you.”

Here in Whitehaven Hall I would play the harper not the knight, hoping if God wanted me alive he would see to it no one recognized me during my convalescence. Which, the longer I gazed upon the halo of hair spun from the sun’s very rays and her skin of freshest buttercream, the more I hoped my stay would be a long one.

She moved my harp to within arm’s reach. “That would please me very much… and I would be even more pleased if the harper would tell me his name.”

So lost was I in the gray-blue sea of her eyes fixed so intently on mine, I could barely remember the name her household would all despise me by let alone devise a cunning one to replace it.

“Drustan,” I told her, embarrassed at once by the vulgarity of simply taking on another form of my own name. Cupping my wound, I eyed the bandages, pretending it was pain distracting me and making me hesitate over offering up a name that should be as close to thought as a second skin.

“Drustan,” she repeated, and the name didn’t sound half so inadequate seasoned by the sweet lilt of her voice. “Call me Yseult.”

“But my Lady—”

“You are a guest and clearly not of Whitehaven. My name should not frighten you.”

“Never, my La—Yseult. Nothing of you frightens me. Yet everything about you terrifies me.”

Had she laughed then, our futures would have spun out very differently. Instead, she grasped my hands in hers, and it was her sun-laden smile that doomed us.

How does a heart betrayed recover? When I thought my Brinn dead, I knew there could be no deeper pain. To find her resurrected should have meant sun and moon spinning through eternal spring. I perched on the peak of joy ready to spread the wings of my love and fly with her forever, only to be slammed into the deepest, darkest valley by her betrayal.

The pack offered no comfort as paired friends and lovers hunted the night. I was outcast, pariah, despite the pack’s token attempts to make me feel otherwise. They tolerated me for the sake of my father, their leader. But their abiding censure was tooth-sharp and only too real to my flayed heart.

When I could no longer withstand their sorrowed glances and the scorn I knew must be seething beneath, I fled.

Avalon called, mythic realm that it might be. Arrow-straight I ran for its shores, desperate to be done with a world that allowed such pain and sorrow.

In my hound skin where I felt most comfortable, I stepped into the fated waters… only to be met by a shimmering fae more lovely than the crisp, star-studded night so gloriously reflected in the still waters of the lake. Moonstruck droplets cascading from her breasts as she rose toward me swirled around her waist, her hips, her knees.

“Your father sends his greetings.”

If liquid water held a voice it would have been hers. The words, though, lashed like storm.

Shifting from hound to fae, I trembled at water’s edge, not certain whether I should kneel or not. “You know my father?” If my father knew I’d come, why had he not stopped me before I left?

“Gwynn ap Nudd is known to all.”

She called him by his Old Name, not by Herne that newcomers to the island lands now greeted him.

“Then you know Avalon is the home of my ancestors. Can you tell me the way there?” Somewhere beyond these waters it lay, I already knew. But the mists that hid it were Old Magic and not easily traversed.

“Avalon is not your path.”

“With respect, my Lady, my path is mine to choose.”

I knew the smile that quirked her lips. Father had bestowed it upon me any number of times when I’d said something foolish. “Then you are here tonight, upon this shore, of your own choosing?”

There was some trick to her asking. The rational part of me knew that as it wrapped itself about the words, trying to distill the meaning from them. But the splendor of the Lady of the Lake, who I knew her for now, made concentrating on the rational all but impossible.

“My decision is not impulse, my Lady, if that is your meaning. It was months in the making and a journey of two days, by hound’s legs. At any time I could have turned away.”

“So if Brinn had not been wounded unto death on that May Day a year and more ago, you would be here, this night, still?”

“You know Brinn?”

“I’ve met her hound. Your father provided the details. And my question is yet unanswered. If Brinn had chosen you above all others, would you be here now?”

I shook my head. “Surely, though, you aren’t meaning Fate is more than myth? That the Roman Sisters and the Northern Norns are real? That the pattern of our lives is woven before birth?”

It was the Lady’s turn to shake her head. “The only thing fated at birth is death. The rest is circumstance, though many call it Fate. It is the interconnectivity of circumstance—your own with others—that determines each step you take. Your path to this shore began when Brinn was hit by the iron-tipped arrow.”

The furrows deepened between my eyes as I considered the connecting of circumstance that had driven me here. “That doesn’t explain why the final steps to Avalon would not now be mine to take.”

“Because your father wills another path. A father’s final lesson as it were. And I am here to see it done.”