Spirit of the Mist (18 page)

“What mistake could you have made?” he asked, placing his hands lightly on her shoulders and trying to keep his voice light as well. “Are you not certain you have done as well as you could have in choosing a man?”
 

He laughed a little. “I will introduce you to a few of my cousins, and you can see how I compare. I am not so gifted with words as Lasairian, nor as handsome and golden-haired as Ailin, nor the possessor of as many gold wristbands and brooches and young bulls and heifers as Conaire…but perhaps you could still learn to accept me after all, and not think our marriage a mistake.”
 

She turned to him. “It is not you who is the mistake. I have never known any man as handsome or as strong or as kind as you are. There would be nothing easier for me than to walk to that bed with you and give you my love in the way that I have longed to do almost from the first day I met you.”
 

He shook his head, confused. “Surely there is nothing to stop us from doing so, then. We have married each other; there is no reason why we should not—”
 

Muriel abruptly stepped away from him. “Here is the reason, Brendan.” She touched the cool rim of the wide bronze basin, staring at its dark surface. “I told you of my sisters…”
 

“You did.”
 

“And you saw them.”
 

“I saw them.” He reached out and placed his fingers on her cheek, gently turning her face to look at him. “Do you still doubt me? You must have believed, today when we stood before the druids out there on the point above the sea, that I was the king you wanted to marry—else you would not have been there. Why do you doubt me now?”
 

She turned away again. “I did not doubt you before the ceremony began—but I cannot forget what happened all throughout the day, from the moment the reading began.”
 

He looked at her with a slight frown of disapproval. Quickly she went on. “At the first mention of your name, my dolphin brooch slipped from my shoulder and dropped to the mud. While trying to recite the contract, the druid lost his memory. At the mention of you as the tanist, the honeybee left her sting in your neck, right beneath your tanist’s torque. I fell hard to the earth just as I tried to walk across the threshold of the fortress that was to be my new home. And at my wedding feast, the sleeve of my gown went up in flames.”
 

Brendan sighed. “Muriel, as I said at the feast—such things happen from time to time. They can happen to anyone…”
 

“But never all at once.” She shook her head. “I have learned never to ignore the instructions of the natural world. Just one such omen can tell you more than all the wise old druids in Eire…and there was far more than just one such omen that came to us on this day.”
 

Her husband was silent for a time; then he glanced from Muriel to the empty water mirror. “You have married me,” he said. “Do your powers remain?”
 

She took a deep breath and stared down at the mirror. “I have no way of knowing whether they yet remain or not. There is no moon this night, and the water mirror comes to life only when the moon shines down upon it. But even if the moon were full and the sky were clear…” Muriel shook her head. “We are married only according to the laws that men created. We are not married in the true sense of a man and a woman, according to the laws of the natural world. It is not a marriage according to the natural laws. Not…not yet.”
 

He stood close behind her and embraced her, resting his head against her own. “Then come to me now, and we will make a marriage such as will leave you no doubt…and you will find that not only do your powers remain, but they are twice, three times what they were before, so true and so strong is the love that we will find in each other.”
 

She closed her eyes tightly. “Brendan, I cannot! If I had not married you this day, if we had simply given ourselves to each other for an evening’s warmth and little else…my power of magic might remain unaffected.
 

“But I married you under the law, and when I did every sign told me that I had married a man who was not a king and would never be a king. And now… though I love you… I am afraid—afraid to lose what I have, afraid to become what my sisters have become…and at this moment I do not know what to do.”
 

He released her and slowly moved back to sit down on the stone ledge surrounding his hearth. “My lady, I do not want you to be afraid. If nothing else, you must know that I have never spoken anything but the truth to you, in all things and at all times. If you are certain of nothing else, I hope you are certain of that.”
 

Muriel nodded her head. “I do understand. I thought all would be well, for I knew that you told the truth when you returned for me. That was when I saw for myself that you were indeed the tanist of Dun Bochna, one day to be its king. But that was before I saw the signs of the wedding day.”
 

She turned away and began to pace again. In a moment she found herself standing near the sleeping ledge, staring down at the sealskin furs that covered it. With some hesitation, she reached out to touch their softness. Then there was a rustling behind her and another touch at her arm.
 

“Muriel,” her husband whispered, “I must ask you this. Would it matter so much to you if I were not a king? Are you saying that you can love me only if I have the power and wealth that go with kingship?”
 

She raised her head but looked only at the flickering lamplight on the wall above the bed. “I loved you when you had nothing, Brendan. I loved you when none of us knew whether you were king or slave, when you had nothing at all to give me save a few bright flowers gathered from the cliffs.
 

“It is not a question of whether I can love you, for you know that I can, and that I have. It is a question of whether you can love me.”
 

Brendan turned away from her again, and she began to hear the anguish in his voice. “I stopped at nothing to bring you here, to have you for my wife, because you are the one I love! What else would you have me do? What else can I do to prove to you that—”
 

She turned to face him. “You saw my sisters! You saw what happened to them when they married men who were not kings. Would you have me become as they have become? Is that what you want in a wife—a woman who has no power, who has no magic, who has lost herself, who is hardly more than an empty shell?”
 

“Of course I do not…and I will never have any such woman for my wife. You are filled with power and with magic and with the tides of life, and that is how you will remain—at this moment and all through this night and tomorrow when the sun rises and on all the days after that.”
 

Muriel closed her eyes. “I wish I could know that. I wish I could be sure. I wish—”
 

“You wish that I were already the king and not merely the tanist.”
 

“I cannot become like my sisters,” she whispered. “I cannot become like my sisters.”
 

Brendan reached out to her and held her with one hand firmly on each of her arms. “If I must, I will wait for you,” he said, giving her a little shake, and she could hear the truth in his words even as she heard the tension and frustration in them. “If it will ease your mind, and if it will help you to know for certain that I married you for love and for no other reason—then I will wait for you, and you will sleep alone in this house until the day that I am made a king.”
 

Chapter Eleven
 

A silence fell between them. Muriel could only stare up at Brendan, her breath coming fast,…stare into his strange eyes and watch him stare back at her, even as his hold on her tightened and he drew her ever closer…even as he slowly bent down until his lips were almost touching hers.
 

His breath warmed her face. The scent of his skin filled her nostrils and went straight to her head. Her lips parted and she started to raise her arms to embrace him, but she could not, for he still had her arms in the iron bond of his hands. Forcing her to keep still, he whispered, “Good night, my wife. In the morning I will return.”
 

She half closed her eyes as his lips touched hers, touched them so lightly that she could barely feel it, yet she knew when they had met because of the sharp, warm thrill that pierced her body. It left her knees feeling as though they would give way and let her fall; it made the flickering lamplight waver and be swallowed by the darkness.
 

She was aware that Brendan still supported her. At last he slid his hands around her shoulders and pulled her close against his chest, where she was held fast by both the strength of his arms and the weightless caress of his lips upon her own.
 

Now her own arms came up to clasp his broad back, and she raised her mouth to kiss him in return. The weakness left her knees and a flash of energy raced through her, leaving Muriel strong and determined and pulling him close to her, drawing him in with embracing arms and demanding lips.
 

Suddenly he wrenched back and held himself still, the tension vibrating through his body. He stared down at her, and Muriel knew he was awaiting her response.
 

“Don’t go,” she whispered then, into the soft flickering light between them. “Don’t go…”
 

Brendan kissed her again, and her eyes closed. He reached down to catch her up in his arms and then carried her past the tall leather screens to the fur-covered bed. There were no more words between them, for even as he set her down he continued to kiss her, sitting on the edge of the bed and clasping her hands back against the furs beside her head so that only their fingers and lips were touching.
 

The fire burned ever lower. The flame in one of the seashell lamps went out. Brendan bent down to kiss her once again—but as he did, Muriel abruptly sat up and slid her hands out from his grasp, swinging her feet down along the side of the bed and standing up in the rushes, her breath coming ragged and quick.
 

“Muriel…” Her husband’s voice had become a rough whisper. “I must go now, or I warn you, I will not go at all.”
 

Standing before him, she reached for the dolphin brooch at her shoulder, turned it to release the clasp, then pulled the long, slender pin out of her mantle. The gray linen fell away to the rushes, and she dropped the brooch within its folds.
 

Her boots and belt soon lay beside the mantle. Carefully she slipped her arms from the sleeves of her purple gown and allowed it to fall atop the linen and the brooch. Beyond the leather screens, another of the lamps flickered into darkness.
 

She started to reach for the neckline of her white linen undergown, but then paused, her hand shaking only a little. “Brendan,” she said, reaching out her hand toward his shadowed figure. “Brendan…”
 

Instantly he stood and caught her hand. After a kiss on her fingers he let her go, and then quickly stripped away his own soft gray linen tunic and leather pants and boots.
 

Now he stood before her as the goddess had made him, silent and noble in the low light of the remaining seashell lamp above the sleeping ledge. Slowly Muriel stretched out one hand to him, reaching up to touch his neck beneath his heavy golden torque, running her finger slowly over his throat and down his broad chest and the soft golden brown hair that covered it, down to his slim waist and long, narrow hip, again encountering a mat of soft hair, and then hesitating.
 

He stepped closer. Taking her face in both of his hands, he kissed her long and gently. Then he took hold of the top of her white linen gown and eased it down over her shoulders, and it too fell to the rushes.
 

Now it was his turn to begin a slow tracing of her body, only he used both of his hands, running the tips of his fingers gently over every curve, every rise, every fall, every secret place of hers that no man had ever seen or touched.
 

Muriel could only close her eyes and steady herself with her hands on his sides, sliding them up over his chest and shoulders as he leaned down to kiss her and then continued his affections with the softness of his mouth, bending down until his hair fell across her own shoulders, easing down to one knee so that he could touch and kiss and caress every part of her.
 

Finally the lamp above the sleeping ledge wavered and went out. Muriel felt herself melting into the darkness, and it seemed to whirl past her and draw her in the way the power of the sea held its victims fast and carried them away.
 

Brendan lifted her up and laid her down on the soft furs of the bed, and then stretched himself out close and warm beside her. Together they rode the tides that their love had created, again and again, until at last they lay exhausted and sleeping in each other’s arms.
 

When the dawn came, and with it a pale gray sky, a clamor rose up from the grounds of the dun somewhere far outside.
 

Muriel was the first to open her eyes.
 

She cuddled against her husband with her head pillowed on his chest; the steady and reassuring beat of his heart had comforted her all the while she slept. One of her legs was drawn up over his hip, and she and he lay pressed together, their skin warm and damp in the humid midsummer dawn.