Shana Abe (2 page)

And indeed, even as a child Solange often seemed possessed of a sort of magic, ancient eyes in a young face, a crackle of energy ever present in her fingertips.

Damon didn’t care. She was his sparkle, she was his life, even back then. And he was her champion, always defending her oddities, which he saw as proof of her unique beauty, teaching her the ways he knew to get on in the world.

Sometimes at night she would drift to sleep on his shoulder, her head tucked under his chin, the hot, sweet childish smell of her filling his senses. He would hold her close and let the feeling of satisfaction wash over him in great waves.

Adults of the castle regarded him as an older brother to her, which by his birth and status he was entitled to be called.

But he loved her, only her, always her. It never occurred to him to be a brother. He was simply waiting for her to grow up so they could be married. Solange belonged to him as surely as he did to her. Marriage was the only possible outcome, and in his youthful naïveté Damon never doubted the day would come when they would drink from the same cup as man and wife.

So he was content to wait for her, to wipe her nose in the drafty winters, to dry her tears over pets frequently lost in the hunts—for nothing could persuade her not to befriend the great dogs, who always doted on her. To take her hand and show her the safest way
to climb the tallest tree in the ancient orchard, since she was determined to do it one way or another anyway.

She trusted him implicitly, she relied on him as the source of all possible good things in her life. She did love him. But the role of daughter of the castle had confines even she could not shirk.

As Solange grew older, Damon couldn’t help but look at her with a possessive pride that he was careful to disguise. Although he realized his destiny was with her, he also knew it would take every ounce of his tact and cunning to win her from her father, Henry, the powerful Marquess of Ironstag.

Damon Wolf was not landless, but his parents, the Marquess and Marchioness of Lockewood, had died of cholera early in his childhood, leaving him subject to a harsh feudal system that crushed the meek and infirm. Solange’s father had accepted the three-year-old boy as his ward, since Damon’s father had been a close friend. He could not bring himself to leave the child to die at the hands of ambitious lords.

Damon’s family castle, Wolfhaven, had been rapidly abandoned. It sat perched dramatically atop a rugged hill overlooking both land and sea, perpetually shrouded in mist and thick forest. Rumors had long since claimed it to be a place of pagan demons. Druid devils built the blackened base stones of it, it was whispered, and held their unholy rituals on its grounds. Indeed, the story wound on, the noble family itself was descended from these very pagans and had taken the name of Wolf as their own, from the familiars that they had used in their spells.

These stories turned both the castle and the family into curious objects of fear and fascination for the peasants. The last Marquess and Marchioness of Lockewood had held the village society together by sheer force of will. But by the time they had succumbed to the disease combing their castle, most of the population had either already died or fled. Surely, the rapidly disappearing locals pointed out, the place was cursed by God.

And so Wolfhaven stood alone, a spired monument to a nearly vanished family. True to its name, packs of wild wolves could often be heard crying amid the stones at night. Peasants would not go near it, nobles thought it too inconvenient to bother with. But the land was another matter altogether.

As the young marquess grew to manhood, he watched helplessly as his ancestral properties were slowly overtaken by encroaching lords. His guardian made little attempt to right matters. Henry was busy enough sowing and strengthening the boundaries of his own lands.

This left the child Damon in the odd position of being a noble orphan, ward of the overlord but not the son this family needed. Not quite impoverished, yet with no practical resources to speak of.

He slipped in and out of the cracks of the castle society, a chameleon of social status. Wellborn but powerless, his determination to find his own way won him a small but loyal handful of friends among the serfs and freemen, particularly the castle physician. But no one could say what would become of him.

Damon himself had long felt the call to be a healer. His persistent but unobtrusive presence on the professional
visits of the physician merited him a sort of unofficial apprentice status. He learned the basics of medicine but soon discovered his growing thirst for knowledge was no longer satisfied by the aging doctor. So Damon branched out, speaking to villagers about home remedies, cornering visitors to the castle to learn whatever they knew, or had heard of.

By the time he was a youth, he had expanded his studies to include an array of herbology far beyond that of any for miles around. A steady trickle of patients, all of them peasants, began to come to him for help for their impacted teeth, broken bones, and various illnesses. His popularity grew, in part because his cures often worked, but also because unlike Henry’s doctor, he charged nothing for his services.

Damon always did the best he could to help, but he knew there was so much more out there waiting to be discovered. If only he had the means, how much more he could do.…

Years were spent adding to his collection of pharmacopoeia. Solange often secretly accompanied him into the forests and bogs around the village, where they collected anything interesting they could find. He cherished her company not just because he loved her, but also because she had an unerring eye for detail and could spot the tiniest of plants which eluded him.

By all signs he would become a great healer. However, like the girl he loved, Damon could not escape his heritage. Nobles did not enter into professions. If he tried, he knew he would be shunned by his peers. To take his practice beyond a hobby would be inviting official disaster from Henry.

He was coming of age to inherit an empty, crumbling castle, the few feral remains of once-green fields, and a neglected village or two on the outskirts of civilization.

He never doubted he could put it all to rights. There had to be a solution that would allow him to both restore his castle and heal people, as he dreamed. He was waiting for Solange. They would do it together.

Their time was coming.

One early evening, a few weeks after she turned sixteen, Solange called Damon to her chambers. Ordinarily it would be forbidden to have an unrelated male of his age secluded with her. The fact that he was allowed this freedom made him uneasy, as he began to suspect that he was considered no threat to her maidenhood.

Solange sat by the open bay window, a dusky figure silhouetted against the sinking sun. She would insist on keeping her windows open in dry weather until the last slice of sun disappeared over the horizon, no matter what the season. She told him once she could not enjoy the fiery pageantry the sun put out every evening if she had to view it stifled behind a thick glass barrier.

The purity of her profile was etched clearly, reminding him of a lunar moth he had seen one night in the forest near the village: brilliant, graceful. Ethereal.

He walked over to her.

“Damon, what do you think? Lady Elsbeth says a woman is in disharmony without a husband. She says a woman is no match for the earthly temptations of sin, and that woman’s natural weaknesses dictate she be controlled by man.” Solange turned to look up at him,
tilting her head curiously. “She says God made us this way for our own good.”

Damon made an exaggerated grimace. “Lady Elsbeth is a pious old hag. Everyone knows she rules Lord Hatrone, not the other way around.”

She smiled briefly, eyes twinkling. “Well, yes, that’s rather what I thought too.”

He sat beside her on the bower, letting the cool breeze from the open window drift over him. She scooted over and rested her head on his shoulder. Her arms twined around his waist, securing him closely.

Even this innocent touch sent his senses reeling. Her long hair draped over his arm and brushed his hand. He spread his fingers and then closed them again, trapping the silky strands against his skin.

“A man and a woman have a mutual need,” he said slowly. “They create a balance between them.”

He couldn’t think of what more to say. She wasn’t ready for him yet; in spite of his burning impatience, he knew she wasn’t ready. He lifted his hand and let her hair flow freely over his wrist. The texture fascinated him. It was thick and soft, rich and brown and shiny, always smelling of her. The setting sun brought out the copper highlights glinting through it.

“Damon,” she said, and then her voice trailed off. She sighed and shifted a little against him.

“Yes?” He tried to feel brotherly, but the dark spell she put over him was making him dizzy again, making him want to forget the promise he made to himself to wait one more year for her. She rubbed her face against his arm like a sleepy kitten. It made him smile in the gathering dusk.

“Damon, when are you going to kiss me?”

The surprise of it winded him as if he had been thrown from his horse. He couldn’t seem to move for a long instant. Solange kept her face hidden in the full sleeve of his tunic.

Finally she looked at him, peering up through the thick fan of her lashes. She didn’t speak again. She didn’t smile to show it a girlish prank. She waited.

Damon had lost and he knew it. Even as he lifted his hand to cup her chin he was sharply regretting his loss of restraint. But he could not stop.

Her lips were full and sweet, had always looked to him like ripe cherries, or red roses, and more recently, like soft, forbidden feminine things. He watched his thumb trace their outline, watched them part gently, and felt her warm breath against his fingers. Her eyes were sleepy now, half-lidded, full of flames he should have recognized before.

All thoughts of caution fled. She was offering herself to him and he was powerless to hold back anymore. Nothing could be more right.

Damon tilted his head and rested his lips against hers. He was uncertain, breathless, and trying desperately not to frighten her. Her lips were softer than he imagined, tasting of some unknown delicious thing that could only be her. It was a potent realization that had him suddenly crushing her closer.

The kiss deepened, the blood pounded in his head, obscuring all but her. The taste and smell of her overflowed in him, added raw power to the embrace as the fire roared through him.
Solange, Solange, Solange
 …

Solange helped him, wrapping her arms around his
neck and pressing her body tightly against his. Her firm breasts met his chest, her hair surrounded them both like a shadowed secret. She drew back to take shallow gasps of air, but he was beyond that, kissing her cheeks, the elegant line of her jaw, the tender throat. He heard a moan and realized only distantly that it came from him.

She responded eagerly, a little clumsy in her inexperience and haste. Her fingers caught in his hair, tugging at him.

He held her close and tried to show her all the pleasures she could have, but was distracted by the scent of her skin, the salty taste of her cheek beneath his tongue.

There were tears running down her face. Many, many tears.

The knowledge left him sick to his stomach. God in heaven, what was happening here? He was an animal, to use her like this.

He grasped her arms and pulled them free of his neck.

“Mistress?”

It was Adara, her maid, entering the chamber with tonight’s dinner gown and bliaut.

Solange turned swiftly away to face the window, wiping her tears away with the tips of her fingers. “Leave it on the bed, Adara. I will be with you in a moment.”

Damon felt the woman’s scrutiny. He stood. “I must go. I will see you at supper, Solange.”

She faced him, still sitting. She said nothing, merely searched his face with her eyes. For the first time, he
felt uncomfortable with her. Her clear, penetrating gaze was unsettling.

Her lips appeared wet and bruised, glistening. He had to leave now, before he did something to completely humiliate himself.

“Yes,” she said softly. “I will see you then.” She lowered her gaze, freeing him to walk briskly from the chamber.

S
olange stood in front of the polished glass that reflected her image back to herself in wavy segments. She raised her eyebrows. The wavy Solange did the same, only the eyebrows were the thickness of caterpillars and reached up into the hairline of the reflected girl. She lowered them, and the girl in the mirror resumed her regular warped pattern.

The glass girl was strangely beautiful to Solange, an image of herself and yet not herself, dressed in an emerald green gown with an embroidered blue and gold bliaut over it. The bliaut hugged her figure, drawing in the gown underneath with girdled ties of gold that looked richly elaborate in the mirror.

She took a step sideways for balance as Adara tugged on the chained belt hanging low from her waist. The maid worked quickly, her hands as informal as always, but there was something different about her tonight, a suppressed excitement Solange could sense but not articulate.