Shana Abe (10 page)

Marcus had lived in both worlds, that of the wild mountain Highlands and that of the unforgiving deserts, and how could he ever bring the two together for his clan when he couldn’t even do it for himself?

He was caught, precarious, on the line that separated
these two opposing poles, trying to find a peace somehow between them.

“She is quiet,” said Balthazar now, nodding his head to the lone woman in the leaves and ferns.

A very bad sign, Balthazar was saying, and Marcus could not help but agree.

“We’ll make the next marker by tomorrow noon.” It was Hew, his lieutenant, approaching the two men with bread for each of them. All three then turned back to look at Avalon.

“Did she eat?” Hew asked.

“Aye,” said Marcus. “Not much.”

“Ye should make her eat more,” observed Hew.

“Aye.” Marcus took a deep breath, clearing the aggravation from his head. Making Avalon eat the little she did had been trial enough.

She didn’t want the bread. She wouldn’t touch the cheese. She turned up her nose at the oatcake and clamped her lips shut, turning her back to him.

It had taken Balthazar to get her to eat even an apple, both of them sitting together in the woods as if they were all alone.

Marcus had watched the scene while bent over his saddle, adjusting a loose seam in the leather. He had to walk away from her after she refused the oatcake. He didn’t want to but she was trampling his reputation beneath her pretty feet without having to utter a word, just the straight line of her back and the unequivocal rejection of him tearing him to shreds. Everyone had been watching; Marcus was sharply aware that he was still relatively new to most of these men, and they would be judging him by his actions.

It was either walk away or force her. And he would not force her. That had been his father’s way, not his own.

He thought now that it was fortunate for both of them that the legend had it she would be predisposed to hate him. Her behavior now, in fact, served only to seal the idea in the clansmen’s minds that she would be their salvation.

But she had to eat, and it frustrated him that she would not.

Then came Balthazar, graceful and dignified, a blaze of indigo and saffron robes amid the muted colors of the woods. He had squatted near Avalon but not too near. Just enough to get her attention, Marcus supposed.

Marcus had no idea what his friend had said to get her to eat, if they had spoken at all. He had not heard any words exchanged, but after a few minutes she had reached for the apple Bal handed her.

She had even changed her mind about the bread, consuming it in tiny, slow bites as she stole glances at Bal.

“She has pride,” said Balthazar now, and Marcus thought this was meant to be an understatement. “It will not let her eat from your hand.”

Hew frowned. “Not eat from the laird’s hand? She’ll be changing her mind soon enough on that, no doubt.”

“No doubt, as you say,” agreed Bal serenely.

Marcus knew then he had more than a battle on his hands. More, in fact, than he had ever anticipated. It was going to be war.

Chapter Four
 

F
or seventeen years of his life Marcus had dreamed of his family tartan. It was black with thin, even stripes of gold and red and purple, and to the young man he was, it had represented everything of meaning in his existence.

He had worn it with pride all the way to Jerusalem with Sir Trygve, had mended the tears it gathered on the journey, washed out the blood—his and the enemy’s—when he could. It had lasted a powerful long time, that thick woolen tartan, and even though the Holy Land had days so hot it seemed the skin would melt from his bones, he had not taken it off. It was the symbol of his clan, his home, his hope.

Aye, he had worn it thin, until the pleats were stiff with grime and blood and desert dust, and every night he had dreamed of the day he could go back to Scotland.

Until Damascus. Until that one night when it had been torn off his body and burned, his boyhood dreams burned with it.

When it was over he had taken up Sir Trygve’s hauberk and shield, and that had been his uniform ever since. But every now and again the dreams had crept back, slipped through the cracks of his defenses and
made him think impossible thoughts: snow, woodsmoke and crisp air, green valleys. Innocence.

It had taken an act of will greater than he knew existed to don the tartan again when he finally returned. Only Balthazar might have understood how hard it had been. Only Balthazar had been there in Damascus and watched Marcus abandon his hope.

Still, he would not give in to the seduction of the comfort the plaid offered. Not so easily. He kept his own Spanish sword at his waist, a clear outward sign of his inward difference. That the people of his clan had admired it, thought it a cunning and lethal thing was fine. It would not have prevented him from carrying it even if they had loathed it. He needed something, some visible thing to keep him in check amid the rough paradise of Scotland, to keep him from forgetting the trials he had endured in foreign lands.

Nevertheless, the tartan he wore now was new and sturdy, and Marcus could not help but think it a miracle of sorts, the straight threads of gold and red and purple, the solid black around them. It was the inviolable tie to his heritage he needed as much as that Spanish blade.

So here was Lady Avalon in front of him this morning, and the sun had decided to rise and shine through the trees, catching in the ivory silk of her hair, caressing the curve of her cheek.

She was so lovely, even in her fancy ruined gown. She was so lovely as she took the tartan Marcus held out to her and threw it to the ground at his feet.

“I have made a vow never to wear it again,” she said, defiant and delicate all at once. He was not fooled by
that delicacy. She was the product of Hanoch as surely as he was.

“Alas for you,” Marcus told her, picking it up. “For you are going to wear it anyway.”

She didn’t back down, not one bit, but stood ready, fists at her sides, leaves clinging to her. The amethysts on her bliaut were undimmed, glinting in the sunlight.

“You will have to make me,” she said, soft and deadly.

In his mind’s eye she was undressed suddenly, fully undressed and delightfully available, beckoning him with a smile. By heavens, he was more than ready for that, to have that unbelievable hair wrapped around him, to taste her again. It would be sweeter and hotter this time, it would not be a lesson but a pleasure—

Marcus blocked the vision, shocked at his loss of control.

Her eyes had become very wide, her whole body grew still as she stared up at him.

She knew. She knew what he had thought.
He
knew that she knew.

It was unexpected, that they would be able to touch thoughts like this, the curse had never mentioned it. But Marcus didn’t doubt the power was real. He had grown up on the legend, it had been ingrained in him from babyhood, his mother crooning his destiny to him in her soft voice as he went to sleep. After she died, when he was ten, it was the women of the clan who took her place, who told and retold the legend to him so that he might understand his role in it when he became a man.

Marcus believed in the curse, and strange as it was, he believed that the bride could know the thoughts and hearts of others. He knew such a power was real,
because a tiny fragment of that gift lived in him, as well. And it was a gift. He would not believe it could be anything else.

Avalon snatched the bundle of cloth from his fingers, walking briskly away. She pushed aside the flap of blanket he had hung between a pair of bushes for her privacy and disappeared behind it.

He could see the outline of her shadow, blending in and out of those of the branches and leaves. A perfect profile, a perfect arm reaching out, a perfect teasing glimpse of a shadow thigh. Perfect everything.

When she emerged again, she wore the tartan.

Praise the clanswoman who had thought to include the silver brooch to secure it and the black gown that went beneath it. Marcus would have never remembered such things.

Lady Avalon threw him a glance as she walked over to her unfinished breakfast. A glance that meant … what? Anger, yes. But something else less easily defined. Wariness, perhaps. Fear—he hoped not. No, it wouldn’t be fear, not in her. More likely caution.

Well, that would be a good thing. She was already almost more than he could handle; a little respect tossed in his direction would not be amiss.

His men watched her eat in silence, noted the neat pleats in the tartan she had managed by herself, all of them exactly right. They exchanged satisfied looks over her bowed head. No one else knew what Marcus did, that she had only capitulated so that she could walk away from him and not have him follow.

Avalon sat on a flat stone in the ground and morosely chewed an oatcake.

Here it was again, that horribly familiar plaid enclosing her body. She really had sworn not to wear it again. She had been fourteen, and the night she had crossed the border from Scotland back into England she had taken it off for what she had thought would be the very last time. She had burned it herself in the hearth of the inn where they stayed, had watched the flames eat into it, and no one had said a word to her, not the king’s emissary nor the soldiers nor the innkeeper. They had all witnessed it turn to ash with her.

And now like a bad dream it had returned, the Kincardine tartan draping over her shoulder and wrapping around her waist, just as it did the shoulders and waists of all the other women of the clan. She had remembered how to handle the giant square of material without thinking twice; her fingers had readily managed the tricky tucks and folds that had taken her untold time to master as a girl. She knew she looked no different from any of them now. It filled her with gloom to realize how easy it was for the Kincardines to absorb her into themselves again.

And was this moment of relative freedom worth the loss of that vow she had made? Was it worth it just to stem the torrent of feeling she had sensed from Hanoch’s son when he faced her over the rejected bundle of cloth?

There could be no denial of what had happened. She had said something—already she couldn’t remember what—and he had latched on to her words and transmuted them into churning desire. He had taken her with him.

It had been too abrupt, too stunning. It had been too much like that moment on the stairs in the village of
Trayleigh, when he had touched just her chin and she had felt her entire body go aflame, awake in a way she had never known before.

What to make of it? She had no idea. She had seen looks like his aplenty from men in London, had even begun to notice them all the way back in Gatting, and none of those others had involved her as completely as his did. None of them had invoked the chimera so strongly.

None of them made her feel so … 
alive.

The oatcake was flaky and dry, the bland flavor of it coming back to her in slow degrees. Another thing she thought she had seen the last of.

Marcus Kincardine, all in all, had proven to be nothing like what she had expected. He was talking to a cluster of his men now, all with serious demeanors, each of them as acutely aware of her as she was of them. Marcus had his back to her; he was saying something to a brown-haired man who looked vaguely familiar. Probably one of Hanoch’s minions.

The wizard Balthazar stood slightly apart from the others, holding on to the magnificently tooled silver bridle of his stallion. He gave her a stately nod.

Avalon had noticed right away that this man had a different aspect; it had not been his foreign clothing or his earrings that set him apart, but rather his bearing. The chimera had whispered the right word for him as soon as he came close: wizard.

It was a laughable thought, one fantasy being identifying another. Yet even if such a creature were only fantasy, surely this man embodied it in full. His
wholeness
seemed so right, it shone from his eyes. Avalon knew that he alone had accepted her as she was, without judgment, without forethought. Just her. She almost wanted to talk to him, to discover his secrets, but he was the friend of her enemy. So she could not afford it.

They rode on, for two long days.

No one spoke on the ride. The only sounds were from the horses, snorting and whickering, and the steady push of their hooves in the leaves and peat. Birds stilled as they passed, a few flying up in a mad rush to the sky, living shapes that soared and scattered.

Avalon knew the moment they crossed back into Scotland. She knew it even before they did. The air changed, the light changed, everything changed.

Marcus, behind her, might have felt it at almost the same time. He straightened in the saddle. From him emanated a single word:

Home.

No, she thought, not my home.

But if not here, then where? Not Scotland, not Gatting, not London. Not even Trayleigh, not anymore. Her life had been broken down into so many fragments that she no longer felt any allegiance to anyone or anything.

Only the chimera seemed glad to be back in Scotland. Avalon felt it shift within her, benign now, but so much stronger than it had been before.…